Visualizing Feeling: Affect and the feminine avant-garde 9780755603602, 9781848858510

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1 Lygia Clark at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with her works Unidades (Units), 1958 2 Lygia Clark, Bicho (Beast), 1960 3 Lygia Clark, Máscaras sensoriais (Sensorial Hoods), 1967 4 Lygia Clark, O eu e o tu (The I and the You), 1967 5 Lygia Clark, Baba antropofágica (Cannibalistic Slobber), 1973 6 Eva Hesse, Ringaround Arosie, 1965 7 Eva Hesse, Hang Up, 1966 8 Eva Hesse, Repetition Nineteen III, July 1968 9 Eva Hesse, Several, 1965 10 Eva Hesse, Ingeminate, 1965 11 Eva Hesse, Tori, 1969 12 Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1969 13 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico), 1976 14 Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul), 1973 15 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Iowa), 1978 16 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series), 1980 17 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Iowa), 1979 18 Ana Mendieta, Corazón de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood), 1975 19 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Iowa), 1978 20 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Re Dis Appearing, 1977 21 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Passages, Paysages, 1978 22 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Passages, Paysages, 1978 23 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Passages, Paysages, 1978 24 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Permutations, 1976 25 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mouth to Mouth, 1975 26 Eva Hesse, Untitled or Not Yet, 1966 27 Lygia Clark, Camisa-de-força (Straight Jacket), 1969 vi

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Acknowledgements

I have accumulated many debts of gratitude in the course of writing this book. In the first instance, I owe much to a master class on feminism and psychoanalysis run by Margaret Whitford at Macquarie University in 1997. It opened my eyes to the breadth and variety of psychoanalytic approaches. Before that class I was narrowly engaged with the usual postmodern suspects: Lacan, Kristeva, Irigaray. From that class was born the first reading group that sustained my early efforts to come to grips with affect – the Silvan Tomkins Reading Group (Elizabeth Wilson, Gill Straker, Anna Gibbs, Melissa Hardie, Maria Angel and Doris McIlwain). I learnt a lot in their company as we ploughed through all four volumes. The second reading group, which emerged from this one, examined the work of Melanie Klein (Elizabeth Wilson, Gill Straker, Kylie Valentine, Robert Reynolds). The ‘Mrs Klein group’ in turn transformed into the ‘Controversial Discussions group’ (Kylie, Eliz and Gill), which still meets periodically despite Eliz’s migration to the United States. With great cakes, stimulating discussions and much positive affect, these last two groups have sustained and expanded my thinking about psychoanalysis. Outside of my reading groups, my biggest thanks must go to Liz Grosz, who is not only a terrific friend but also a fabulous teacher whose lessons still inform how I think. Most importantly, this project required research trips to see the art that I discuss in the flesh, and this was made possible by generous funding from the Australian Research Council. My other huge debt is to my friend and colleague, Toni Ross, whose razor sharp mind is a constant source of stimulation. Other friends and colleagues have also helped and challenged me along the way, but most especially: Andrew McNamara, Richard Read, Ann Stephen, Kristina Huneault, Virginia Coventry, Charles Merewether, Mariana Pagotto, Tony Bond, Anne Graham and Joan Grounds. I would also like to thank the helpful staff at various museums, galleries and foundations who have very kindly assisted me. In particular, I’m very grateful to vii

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Mark Hughes at Galerie Lelong, New York, Olga Viso from the Hirshhorn Museum, Sylvia Bandi from Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, Stephanie Cannizzo and Genevieve Cottraux from the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Robin Held at Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Lucina Ward at the National Gallery of Australia and Fabiane Moraes at Associação Cultural, O Mundo de Lygia Clark. Thanks also to my editor at I.B.Tauris, Liza Thompson, for making it all possible, and to Claire Armstrong for such careful and sensitive copy-editing. Last but not least, I thank my partner Nick Smith for his love and support. This book is dedicated to him and to the memory of my father, Laurie Lazarus Goldstein Best.

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Introduction

This book addresses a methodological blindspot in art history: the interpretation of art’s affective dimension. To those interested in art but not involved in the academic enterprise of art history, this may seem a very strange oversight. Surely the arousal of feeling is one of the experiences art is expected to deliver and therefore something art historians need to consider in the evaluation and interpretation of art? There are many reasons for this blindspot. In chapter two I consider some of the specific historical reasons for this lacuna in the interpretation of late modern art of the 1960s and 1970s – the period I focus upon in this book. Most notable among them is the deliberate rejection of feeling by key artists and art movements, such as minimalism, conceptual art, land art and structural film. Art of this period is generally characterized as anti-aesthetic, antiexpressive and anti-subjective in approach and tenor. One of my aims in this book is to revise this characterization by looking at the way in which art remains subjective and concerned with feeling, even when artists explicitly reject such qualities and responses. To summarize, my argument is that art such as minimalism facilitates reflection on feeling and its complicated role in the reception of art precisely because of the efforts to expunge it from the work of art. In other words, the desire to withdraw or withhold feeling inadvertently underscores the question of feeling. In the case of minimalism, the withdrawal of feeling actually generated a complex range of affective responses on the part of contemporary critics and commentators. For example, minimalist art was claimed to be aggressive, 1

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boring and pleasurable. These diverse reactions point to the persistence of the question of feeling, albeit in a confused and contradictory fashion that requires further interpretation and analysis. Consideration of the remarkable range of contemporary responses has now dropped out of the discussion of minimalist art. By retrieving this lost historical record I question the characterization of the art of this period as affectless and thereby make way for the particular contributions of the four women artists of this study: Lygia Clark, Eva Hesse, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Ana Mendieta. All four artists are aligned with the avant-garde practices of the 1960s and 1970s that are routinely interpreted as rejecting the expressive or subjective dimensions of art. Far from conforming to the affectless characterization, these artists, in very different ways, produced deeply moving work. There are other women artists who also produced moving or affectively engaging work at this time – for example, Annette Messager, Francesca Woodman, Gego and Cecilia Vicuna. Indeed, looking closely at the selection of works in Catherine de Zegher’s landmark 1996 exhibition Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art, in, of and from the Feminine, I find that many of the artists chosen for that show could be included in a study of art that is affectively engaging. De Zegher, however, does not characterize her choice of artists in terms of affect or feeling. Her selection is framed by an alignment of the ‘feminine’ with the disruption of meaning, as the catalogue’s opening epigraph from Julia Kristeva indicates: ‘I would call “feminine” the moment of rupture and negativity which conditions the newness of any practice.’1 The types of literary practice Kristeva calls feminine are formally innovative; they renew literature by a kind of positive destruction – a dehiscence perhaps – that breaks up established languages, introducing what she describes as ‘ruptures, blank spaces, and holes into language’.2 For Kristeva, a ‘feminine’ practice need not be made by a woman; hence her key examples are male writers, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud and James Joyce. Aligning the typical innovations expected of avant-garde art or literature with a feminine position is of course contentious and open to debate, however what interests me here is de Zegher’s subtle refashioning of this idea in order to trace a female avant-garde lineage in twentieth-century art. De Zegher, unlike Kristeva, is interested in the specific contribution of women artists to the avant-garde tradition. So while de Zegher is not the first to apply Kristeva’s ideas to women artists, her exhibition was the first largescale survey of women’s art to emphasize formal innovation.3 This emphasis

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on original experimentation with form and materials is spelt out in one of the few summative statements about her selection of artists. She explains: ‘One common property of the works in the exhibition is their allusion to ideas that do not have material substance but are made material in the work itself; this work makes palpable the conceptual engagement with “beginnings”.’ 4 Here de Zegher continues the early feminist art-historical concern with constructing an alternate history of women artists, but adds the more exacting criterion of originality of both materials and ideas. Originality, in turn, is rethought from a feminist perspective. De Zegher perfectly dovetails feminist theory with careful attention to new modes of innovation, arguing that feminist art practice and theory enable us ‘to see and to focus on what is in eclipse ... or has different qualities of perceptibility’.5 In sum, de Zegher’s achievement is double-edged: the recovery project of feminist art history is subjected to avant-garde standards and measures and, in turn, ideas of avantgarde art are reworked by feminist theory. In other words, her approach to feminist art history involves claiming avant-garde practices for women, thereby performing an advance on Kristeva’s position at this time, which, at most, accorded women the feminine role of refusal or opposition to the existing state of affairs.6 This type of feminist art history stands in marked contrast to the increasingly common practice of creating a separate and separatist history for women artists. It also means that feminist art history can more directly impact upon mainstream art history by challenging what constitutes innovation. It is in the spirit of this kind of feminist art history that I offer a consideration of the role of feeling in late modern art. The affective dimension of art, alongside its materials and methods, I contend, is part of the artistic means of production that is subject to innovation. Indeed, the four artists in this study all produced art with an affective dimension as intriguing and inchoate as the other material and formal means of their invention. In other words, new ‘beginnings’ can involve feeling as well as form – feeling is precisely one of the ‘different qualities of perceptibility’ that feminist theory should illuminate. I am agnostic about whether this different quality can be claimed as some kind of peculiarly feminine artistic characteristic. Without doubt, in the art of the 1960s and 1970s an affective component is a difference that is manifested most consistently and substantially by women’s art. In contemporary art, however, one cannot draw such a firm conclusion, although a case could be made for the facilitatory role played by these earlier women artists: they showed how to combine the rejection of certain types of expressive means

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(traditional expressionism, for example) with a subtle reinvention of the role and possibilities of feeling. Assuming the custodianship of feeling in this fashion might seem inevitable or even retrograde given the traditional alignment of femininity with feeling and emotion as opposed to the masculine domains of thinking and reason. The stereotype that women are more emotional than men, as well as the common idea that emotion is a disruption to thinking, must surely rest upon this familiar binary logic. Why, then, perpetuate or reinforce such views? My approach here is to follow the lead of the type of feminist theory sometimes called ‘strategic essentialism’, an approach that has sought to illuminate the terms neglected or denigrated as feminine.7 In some instances this feminist gesture is about reclaiming and reworking these terms in order to think about women differently; in others it is posed more narrowly as a disruption to received masculinist accounts of value. In this book I pursue both strategies. I am interested in what distinguishes the work of four leading women artists at a particular moment in art history, as well as how a feminist eye, trained to seek out the neglected or subordinated, can illuminate a more general critical and theoretical problem in a new way. Moreover, by recognizing the gendering of feeling and emotion, its neglect in art history and other disciplines may be brought more sharply into focus. It is worth emphasizing that the neglect of feeling is not specific to art history. Charles Altieri, in his book The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects, observes a similar methodological oversight in the study of literature. He notes that the emphasis on social and historical context rather than the literary text has led to a ‘tendency to overread for “meaning” while underreading the specific modes of affective engagement presented by works of art.’8 When he explored the work of theorists of emotions he found a similar eagerness to engage with the ‘cognitive and moral dimensions of the topic’. In other words, Altieri argues, affects are consistently brought under the sway of reason; their disruptive power is not investigated. The disruptive power of affects is beginning to generate a body of writing in Cultural Studies. In many instances, the opposition between reason and affect is not only pursued, it is entrenched. As Clare Hemmings notes in her careful critique of this rhetorical position, there is a persistent adherence to the idea of affects as beyond the social, beyond interpretation, unassimilable and so forth, but little by way of extended demonstration of these assumptions.9

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While I am interested in the avant-garde tradition and how experiments with feeling might contribute to that tradition, my focus is not upon how affects disrupt meaning. Moreover, I do not subscribe to the view that affects are beyond interpretation. That said, I am not interested in immediately intelligible uses of feeling either. By this I mean, on the one hand, works of art where feeling is hackneyed, clichéd or sentimental and, on the other, works that generate a predictable feeling – for example, those that deliberately intend to shock, horrify or disgust. In short, I am not concerned with works of art that elicit either well-worn responses or easily categorized affects or emotions. My choice of artists was directed by an interest in what could be called ‘non-categorical affect’. That is, the particular women artists were chosen because I found the affective dimension of their work both compelling and yet oddly opaque. In other words, to understand this dimension of their work requires the kind of attention and analysis usually reserved for describing the significance of new means for representing or bringing forth ideas. In order to interpret the affective dimension of these artists’ work, I mainly draw upon psychoanalytic theory, which accounts for my use of the term ‘affect’ rather than ‘emotion’. A word on terminology is perhaps needed here. There is an enormous range of conflicting usages of the terms affect, feeling and emotion in the psychological and psychoanalytic literature, as well as in more interdisciplinary studies. Taking just two contrasting examples, the definitions of these three terms supplied by the psychoanalyst Iréne Matthis and the literary theorist Charles Altieri easily demonstrate the current confusion about them. Matthis, for example, defines emotion as akin to unconscious material; for her it refers to ‘affective manifestations to which we do not have direct conscious access, but which can be inferred from behavioural clues’.10 In contrast, feelings for Matthis are ‘affective phenomena to which we have direct conscious access’. Affect, then, is the collective term that encompasses both emotions and feelings: ‘Affect will be the generalized concept for all those embodied processes that, when they reach consciousness, can be perceived on the one hand as feelings and on the other as emotionally charged physical concomitants’.11 Charles Altieri also takes affect to be the ‘umbrella’ term, although for him, feelings are ‘elemental affective states characterized by an imaginative engagement in the immediate processes of sensation’.12 Emotions are more complex and cognitive in orientation: they are, says Altieri, ‘affects involving the construction of attitudes that typically establish a particular cause and

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so situate the agent within a narrative and generates some kind of action of identification’.13 Given these kinds of terminological variations and reversals, some authors choose to make little distinction between the terms. For example, Ruth Stein, in her book Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect, decides on this basis to ‘make little effort to distinguish among feelings as awareness of affect, affect as a more comprehensive term including all the thinkable components belonging to this domain, and emotion as the complex mixture of affect and our previous experience with a particular affect, as a strongly felt feeling, or as just a feeling’.14 I have tended to follow Stein’s example, however throughout this book I will specify which account or accounts of affect I am drawing upon in the case of particular works of art. The key theorists I use include Freud, of course, as well as a broad spectrum of psychoanalytic thinkers and psychologists, such as André Green, Joyce McDougall, Daniel Stern, Ignacio Matte-Blanco, Donald Winnicott, Silvan Tomkins, Jacques Lacan and Melanie Klein. While at a theoretical or metapsychological level there are conflicts between these different accounts of affect, at the level of application this kind of eclecticism best serves the interpretative demands of different kinds of art practice. Indeed, combing different psychoanalytic theories is a very common approach in contemporary psychotherapy. Marrying psychoanalysis with art history has been facilitated by integrating the analysis of affect with the traditional art-historical problem of expression. Of the many and varied accounts of artistic expression, the most useful for my purposes is provided by the philosopher Edward Casey. His account explicitly rejects the idea of expression as the direct communication of the artist’s feelings – a very common view of the meaning of expression in art history. Casey’s approach has particular purchase for the period I am examining because it matches the broad-scale denunciation by many artists in the 1960s and 1970s of the direct communication model of expression. In contrast, expression for Casey is a property of the aesthetic object. He argues against the idea that the aesthetic object conveys feeling or thought; these are ingredients of the object itself. Casey breaks expression down into three components: the affective qualities of an aesthetic object, its perceptual qualities, and its import or meaning. The affective dimension of a work of art, he argues, accounts for the cohesiveness of expression and the continuity between subject and object. I will return to this assigned role for affect several times in the course of this

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book; at times the role will be confirmed, at others contested. Casey does not give a detailed account of what affect is; for him it is simply the felt dimension of art. His model will be supplemented by more detailed descriptions of the operation and nature of affect from the psychoanalytic and psychological literature. Another useful parallel between psychoanalysis and art history is suggested by Leo Steinberg’s art-historical version of the psychoanalyst’s dispassionate but engaged mode of listening – what is commonly called ‘evenly spaced attention’. Steinberg’s 1972 book Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art is best known for its critique of formalism, however it also contains a useful method for engaging with the affective challenges of modern and contemporary art. He suggests that the first response to new art should be to suspend judgment, holding in reserve criteria and taste based on art of the past in order to give the intentions of the new work the space to emerge and become perceptible. He describes this response as ‘sym-pathetic’, which, as he explains, does not mean the work is immediately endorsed or approved; rather, the aim is ‘to feel along with it as with a thing that is like no other’.15 In Steinberg’s advocacy for a sympathetic response to modern art, feeling is an essential part of receptivity to the new and innovative. But is such attunement to the feeling of a work of art easily attainted? Responsive feeling is often posited as automatic and immediate and yet paradoxically it is also assumed to be obscure and private. Having spent many days, if not weeks and months, trying to figure out what I feel about many of the works in this study, I have to agree that feeling is at once spontaneous and obscure. By this I mean the affective dimension of art may be apprehended or felt fairly immediately, but its meaning is not so readily apparent. This may be because this aspect of art is not part of any of the key methodologies that art history deploys. Hence we have a limited vocabulary to describe artistic feeling and no seasoned experience of detecting and thinking about it. My aim is to redress this poverty of means to discuss affect. *

*

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I begin this task by unpicking the received wisdom about what has been called the ‘anti-aesthetic tradition’. Chapter one seeks to question the idea that minimalism rejected or suppressed subjectivity and expression. It examines an early essay by Rosalind Krauss linking minimalism to a phenomenological

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model of subjectivity. This link between phenomenology and minimalism is now very familiar, however the idea that minimalism provided a model for thinking about subjectivity has dropped out of the current literature on post-1960s art. Krauss’ model is contrasted with a critique of this position in a little-known article by Thierry de Duve. Krauss and de Duve do not agree on the theory of the subject that minimalism enacts, despite agreeing that a model of subjectivity is what is at stake in minimalist art. Each produces an account of subjectivity that is both embedded in the work and yet produced by the viewer’s interaction with it. This peculiar entanglement of beholder and work of art is crucial for an understanding of minimalist art and it is classical aesthetics that enables this entanglement to be most clearly perceived. Thus, although minimalism is often argued to mark the beginning of an anti-aesthetic tradition in art practice and art criticism, its radical achievements are best understood through aesthetics. The chapter thus breaks with the established interpretations of post-1960s art and opens the way for an alternative account of the art of this period that explores how the subjective dimension of art is refigured rather than rejected. Chapter two sets forth a method for thinking about the affective dimension of art through the combination of psychoanalysis and art history. My approach departs from the two dominant modes of psychoanalytic art history: the psychobiographical approach, which aims to link the biography of the artist with his or her art production, and the analysis of the work of art itself as a psychical event. In both instances the art historian takes up a position of mastery – emulating the role of the analyst relative to the analysand or analysed material. Elements of this position are probably ineradicable; interpretation is premised upon this kind of disjuncture. The analysis of feeling rather than form, however, complicates the clear separation of interpreting subject and interpreted object that vision and the analysis of appearances at least promise. The affective dimension is a feature of both subject and object. Put very simply, this can be phrased as ‘when a work of art is moving, I am moved’ – affect permeates the aesthetic encounter. There are instances when the response of the viewer matches the tone of the work of art, and communication – or ‘transmission’ of affect, to use Teresa Brennan’s term – is straightforward, however there are also instances such as affectless art when tone and reception are at variance.16 Showing how affect is a feature of even so-called affectless late modern art demonstrates the pertinence of psychoanalysis beyond the typical methodological applications to surrealist art or art indebted to that legacy.

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Each of the following four chapters focuses on one of the chosen artists. Each artist I examine raises a different problem for interpreting affect in the late modern period. The artists bridge the period of study and cover a range of practices: painting, sculpture, video, film, photography, performance and participatory art. Two of the artists, Eva Hesse and Ana Mendieta, are, of course, very well known and have had numerous well-documented survey exhibitions devoted to their work. Lygia Clark and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, however, will be less familiar to many readers. Lygia Clark’s work has proved to be the most straightforward to analyse in affective terms, not because of the nature of her work – which is actually very challenging – but because her own writings point in the direction of the most pertinent theories for analysing her practice. In chapter three I examine the extraordinary trajectory of Clark’s work from geometric abstraction in the late 1950s through to her participatory works of the 1960s and 1970s and her final series, which takes the form of a therapeutic practice akin to body therapy. Clark’s work is central to accounts of Brazilian Neo-concretism, however more recently her work has also been repositioned within western art-historical accounts of conceptual art, performance art and kinetic art.17 According to Yve-Alain Bois, Clark violently disagreed with her positioning within performance art because her work from 1966 onwards totally rejected the idea of a spectator; instead, it only existed in direct contact with the body of the participant-beholders.18 Her works and group actions required the corporeal support of the participants: she constructed objects to be worn and held and devised collective actions that involved everyday objects (cotton, fabric tubes and so forth). The affective dimension of Clark’s work is most evident in her amplification and intensification of the body’s sensorial capacities. The importance of the kinetic senses of touch and movement in thinking about affect is embedded in our language: being touched, being moved, carried away or transported. Indeed, touch is caught in a whole web of associations of receptivity, understanding and sympathy: a fine touch, in touch with, great tact. This chapter will argue that the important linkage between movement and affect can be understood with reference to Daniel Stern’s concept of vitality affects, which relate to speed, intensity and rhythm.19 In chapter four I examine the late sculptural work of Eva Hesse in relation to the idea of unconscious affect. The possibility of unconscious affect is disputed by many psychoanalysts, starting with Freud, who thought that the

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nature of affect was to be expressed and felt. Against this view, Chilean psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte-Blanco argues that affects are continuous with the unconscious; in particular, they share with the unconscious the characteristic of indivisibility, one of the features of which is the absence of contradictions. An absence of contradictions is an apt way to describe the affective tone of many of Hesse’s works. Such works bring together contradictory or ambivalent feelings. Her abstract sculptures, for example, are referred to as funereal and funny, erotic and yet evocative of both petrifaction and disintegration.20 This ambivalence makes Hesse’s expression highly allusive and elusive – one cannot resolve the contradictory feelings into a cohesive expression. Despite the acknowledgment of the expressive and affective qualities of Hesse’s work by writers such as Rosalind Krauss, Briony Fer and Lucy Lippard, there is no extended analysis of this aspect of her work. Krauss, for example, notes the expressive and affective qualities of Hesse’s work but her focus is on how this is paradoxical given her location within the minimalist discourse of the 1960s.21 Hesse is the only artist in this study whose work is consistently expected to fit within, even as it challenges, the prevalent American art-historical discourses of the 1960s. Her work has thus been identified as a kind of exception to the rule, a status that should be shared by all four artists I examine. The focus of chapter five is Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series. The series focuses on Mendieta’s lone body or its form or outline embedded directly in the landscape. The images (films and photographs) are often tightly framed around the figure so that the usual sense of the landscape as a capacious setting or the backdrop for the figure’s actions is disallowed. Instead, the earth and its processes come to the fore, thereby meeting the figures’ gestures of salutation and communion. Mendieta’s stated intention was to visualize ‘the body as an extension of nature and nature as an extension of the body’.22 Examining this dynamic relationship, and the role played within it by affect, is the focus of the chapter. Mendieta’s affirmation of the traditional alignment of the female body with nature has led to accusations that her work is essentialist. Recent criticism has tended to concentrate on defending Mendieta against this charge, using the idea of performative identity derived from the work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler.23 Focusing on the affective dimension of Mendieta’s work reveals that her practice combines and complicates these two polarized positions: she wants to claim territory for herself and to objectify her existence, but this is coupled with other opposing desires. She wants to merge with

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the earth and to represent the living earth, where her body in the landscape recalls or stands for Mother Nature. The slippages between these different spatial possibilities make her work more complicated than a clash between identitarian feminist propositions and the desire to eschew such foundational necessities. Instead, Mendieta’s work can be tracked and placed in art history as a curious combination of expressive and non-expressive languages. The Silueta Series is at once deeply personal, addressing her sense of exile and her deep desire for permanent connection to land and place, as well as deploying conceptual-art strategies to mute any sentimentality or nostalgia such longing might be expected to call up. Debates about ethnicity, race and gender identity come much more to the fore with the work of both Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. Mendieta’s art, for example, has been interpreted in terms of self-portraiture, female identity and subjectivity, as well as Cuban identity. Similarly, Cha’s work has been examined in terms of its capacity to demonstrate an inbetween or hybrid identity. She, like Mendieta, migrated to the United States as a young teenager (Cha was 12 years old, Mendieta was 13). In contrast to Mendieta, Cha’s art is about the undoing of identity. Critics have repeatedly noted not only Cha’s express intention ‘to be the dream of the audience’ but also that they experienced her work in precisely this way.24 Robert Atkins puts this most directly when he reports leaving one performance feeling ‘suspended between consciousness and unconsciousness, as if I had been dreaming someone else’s dreams’.25 What all of the reports suggest is a pleasurable experience of losing one’s self or being in some way cast adrift from normal existence. This suspended or decentred feeling of Cha’s work has an anaesthetic effect, so that the work has a lulling or soothing quality alongside the registration of sadness and melancholy. The chapter concentrates on her video installation Passages, Paysages (1978), and considers how Cha combines feeling with adherence to conceptual-art tenets of impersonality. Through looking carefully at these four artists and their different ways of generating feeling, a new way of thinking about this period and the contribution of women artists is opened up. The development of an affective dimension to their work is a courageous contribution to the art of the 1960s and 1970s, an era when there was such sustained opposition to the traditionally feminine qualities of feeling and emotion. Understanding the creative ways in which women artists reinvented this aspect of art practice, in line with the advanced art methods and protocols of the time, shows another side of the ‘feminine’ avant-garde tradition.

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Minimalism and Subjectivity: Aesthetics and the Anti-Aesthetic Tradition

In 1994, at a spirited roundtable discussion on conceptual art and the reception of Duchamp, Thierry de Duve asked the following provocative question: ‘Does anybody really believe that there is such a thing as the elimination of subjectivity [in art]?’1 Immediately prior to this question, Alexander Alberro had been explaining how the minimalist artist Donald Judd contributed to the dismantling of the time-honoured link between subjectivity and art. According to Alberro, Judd eliminated, among other things, the ‘transcendental investment from the work of art’ and this, Alberro argues, was ‘an important step in the process toward the dismantling of subjectivity from the work itself ’.2 This idea that minimalism dismantled subjectivity, or eliminated it from the work of art, is a very familiar interpretation of minimalism and one which closely accords with many of the statements made by the artists themselves. These artists aimed, we know, to break with the expressive theory of art and to thereby block the typical egress from the work of art back to the artist and his or her intentions or feelings. Various strategies were adopted to cut the usual filial tie from artist to work. The deliberation of composition was deposed by the industrial logic of artless sequence: ‘one thing after another’, as Donald Judd so famously put it.3 There is no specific artistic personality arranging materials according to this conveyor-belt logic. Industrial methods, materials and ready-made modules were deployed to disable the traditional aesthetic questions of expression, design and purposiveness. Or where design remained an aesthetic problem, it was opened out to include the contingent and incidental features of a site. As Robert Morris explains: ‘the better new 12

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work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer’s field of vision. The object is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic.’ 4 The aesthetic mingles here with the non-aesthetic so that design, and the intention that must be seen to drive it, is not so much negated as radically dispersed. The work is not only dispersed, it is orphaned: no one and nothing is behind it – ‘what you see is what you see’, as the painter Frank Stella says of his own work.5 And all you see in Stella’s stripe paintings, according to Carl Andre, are stripes: ‘There is nothing else in his painting’, he insists.6 Stella, Andre continues, is not interested in expression, sensitivity or symbolism – just stripes. The meaning, then, is in the work, right there on the surface. As Stella further explains: ‘All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.’7 Leaving aside the strange paradox of intending to have no legible intention, these various strategies, and their clear articulation by the artists themselves, indicate that the subjective qualities of art were fairly systematically attacked. De Duve’s question radically breaks with this way of thinking about minimalism.8 By questioning the elimination of subjectivity he also seems to shear away the whole philosophical armature that has collected around this movement in support of this particular reading. This is not the first time de Duve opposed the standard reading of minimalism as anti-subjective. In 1983, in a little-known article called ‘Performance here and now: minimal art, a plea for a new genre of theatre’, de Duve set out to investigate the theory of the subject proposed by minimalism. In this venture he is partly retracing the steps of Rosalind Krauss in her groundbreaking 1973 essay, ‘Sense and sensibility: reflections on post-60s sculpture’, which supplies Alberro with the structure for his argument that minimalism is anti-transcendental. While Krauss does indeed claim that minimalism suspends the a priori or transcendental sense of space, she does not present minimalism as dismantling subjectivity; rather, as we will see shortly, her argument displaces a transcendental subject by way of a phenomenological one. De Duve amplifies certain aspects of Krauss’ argument while disputing others; what the two critics share, however, is the belief that minimalism provides a sensuous theory of the contemporary subject. In other words, minimalism can be understood as setting forth or generating a particular model or theory of contemporary subjectivity. Krauss and de Duve do not agree on the theory of the subject that minimalism enacts, despite agreeing that a model of subjectivity is what is at stake.

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I will return to these differences and commonalities at end of the chapter. What I want to emphasize here is that this crucial link between subjectivity and late modern art has been all but lost in the subsequent literature. A phenomenological approach to minimalism, such as Krauss’, is now simply shorthand for attending to the motile and perceptual experience of art and its context.9 This approach is then neatly historicized, and believed to be dispatched by subsequent art with a more politically attuned concern for context. To resuscitate Krauss’ theoretical concern with models of subjectivity, as de Duve does, upsets this foreclosure while also creating an opening for other ways to trace the progress of late modern art – my overall aim in this book. To begin this task, in this chapter I want to question one of the key ways in which the progress of late modern art is traced – namely, the anti-aesthetic tradition which sees minimalism as the ‘first step’ in the dismantling of the subjective dimension of art. This may seem a rather controversial claim, particularly given the artists’ stated aims, however much depends on how we understand aesthetics, on the one hand, and the subjective dimension of art on the other. Subjectivity in art is most often associated with feeling and, more particularly, the signs of the artist’s vital feeling. Hence minimalism – which, in the early literature, was associated with inhuman coldness, severity and austerity – seems an unlikely vehicle for the investigation of subjectivity. What Krauss and de Duve demonstrate in their analyses of minimalism is that there are other ways of thinking about subjectivity in art. By retracing the complexity of their arguments, their explicit (and implicit) refiguring of subjectivity in art can more clearly be seen. Aesthetics has suffered an even worse fate than the idea of subjectivity in late-modern art history. It comes into play primarily as a set of ideas that are negated in this period: the autonomy of art, taste, beauty, visual pleasure, sensuousness, the expressive genius and so forth. While I certainly do not dispute that some of these ideas are questioned in this period, I do want to question the assumption that they represent the complexity of aesthetics. In what follows I will be arguing that to assume that minimalism is simply a rejection of traditional aesthetics is to miss crucial aspects of its transformation of aesthetic problems. Although Krauss and De Duve do not overlook the aesthetic innovations of minimalism, they do not identify them as such. This curiously positions their work as intersecting with the traditional concerns and questions of aesthetics, despite the fact that this theoretical framework is not explicitly deployed.

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Before proceeding to their analyses, then, this methodological issue needs some clarification. I want to very briefly outline how their work contributes to aesthetic debate. In turn, I contend that the achievements and limitations of their arguments are uniquely illuminated by aesthetics.

1

aesthetics and the anti-aesthetic

The two accounts of minimalism by Krauss and de Duve represent highly innovative theoretical interventions into late modern art history: that is, they refigure the function of art and the terms of its engagement and, even more remarkably, they do this in accordance with challenging historical shifts in practice itself. One could say that these achievements are what one would expect from aesthetics rather than art history. The better contributions to aesthetics usually reflect, or can account for, the dominant art practices and theories of the time, while the best are able to operate beyond their immediate historical period by identifying key or recurrent aesthetic problems and issues. To give an example of the latter, Gyorgy Markus argues that German Idealist aesthetics can be regarded as classical precisely because it inaugurates three key approaches to aesthetics. Most aesthetic theory can still be accommodated within this schema. The three moments into which Markus divides German Idealist aesthetics are characterized by the central aesthetic problem addressed: an aesthetics of reception (Kant), an aesthetics of production (Jena Romanticism) and an aesthetics of the work (Hegel).10 This schema will be used throughout this chapter to track and contextualize the way in which Krauss and de Duve work within the framework of aesthetics. It will come as no surprise that de Duve’s analysis can be framed in terms of aesthetics. His work is distinguished on the contemporary scene by the dialogue he maintains between aesthetics and art history, although this early essay is certainly not as explicitly engaged with aesthetic theory as his more recent work. Krauss, however, is usually positioned within the anti-aesthetic tradition that characterizes much recent American criticism of late modern and contemporary art. This tradition has, as it were, two arms: on the one hand, art practices deemed to be anti-aesthetic and, on the other, a mode of criticism that embraces and validates this approach. In post-war American art practice the anti-aesthetic tradition is commonly seen as beginning with minimalism – as Alexander

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Alberro’s comments make clear – although Neo-Dada, Fluxus and Pop art can equally be aligned with this general tendency. In the art criticism that parallels and thematizes these practices, aesthetics is generally presumed to only explain art outside this tradition; for example, art before minimalism (in particular, Abstract Expressionism) or, more recently, contemporary art that is argued to oppose the anti-aesthetic tradition. Recent American studies of what is referred to as ‘the return to beauty’ make this latter point quite explicitly. Bill Beckley, for example, posits the return of beauty in contemporary art as a rejection of the anti-aesthetic tradition, which he characterizes (or caricatures might be more accurate) as a mordant rejection of sensuousness and pleasure.11 Aesthetics in the anti-aesthetic tradition, then, is rejected twice over: first by certain post-war art practices and then by critics, such as Krauss, who seek to explain these practices. While an anti-aesthetic stance may be the self-conscious positioning of the critic herself, and in this instance the artists she studies, this does not mean that the concerns of aesthetics have thereby disappeared. I am reminded here of Jacques Derrida’s cautionary note that, one ‘always inhabits [the structures one wants to destroy], and all the more when one does not suspect it’.12 Aesthetics is precisely one of the structures of thought that art history inhabits, one that in recent times has been not only neglected and misunderstood but also positively maligned.13 Following Derrida’s logic, the vehement rejection of aesthetics, foregrounded by the very term ‘anti-aesthetic’, should alert us to the ongoing pertinence of this domain of knowledge. Certainly the framework of classical aesthetics allows us to see more clearly what is at stake in the refiguring of art that these two groundbreaking accounts of minimalism trace and, in particular, one of its unnoticed but interesting by-products – the entanglement of beholder and work of art. This entanglement and the anthropomorphic work of art it produces, are the central concerns of this chapter. Anthropomorphism is handled differently by each critic: in Krauss it is inadvertently embraced to maintain the integrity of the work of art; in de Duve it is the nub of minimalism and why it represents a new genre of theatre.

2 relocating subjectivity: t h e r i s e o f t h e s p e c t a to r Taking their cue from Robert Morris’ work in particular, both Krauss and de Duve locate art’s subjective dimension not at its point of production but in its

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reception. It is the spectator who is now ineluctably bound to the work, not the artist. The spectator, perhaps as never before, is crucial for completing the work of art, as indeed Michael Fried noted as early as 1967.14 One of Fried’s chief complaints about minimalism is precisely the need for the beholder. He argues that a minimalist work ‘is incomplete without him, it has been waiting for him’.15 The acknowledged importance of the spectator and the suppression of artistic expression led Hal Foster to say that minimalism embodies the principles of Roland Barthes’ infamous essay ‘The death of the author’.16 But here the reader or viewer has not displaced the author or artist; rather, the author has already ceded the ground. Moreover, the viewer is not the point of the work’s convergence – the reader’s function in Barthes’ text – the viewer is incorporated into the work itself.17 In other words, the spectator is built into the work: space, light and objects only become a work of art when the spectator’s field of vision is added. This shift from an aesthetics of production, with its focus on the artist, to an aesthetics of reception poses a conceptual problem because, while the artist is a distinct individual, the spectator is not. We have no access to this peculiar abstraction, ‘the spectator’, no means to know, as Kant so fully foresaw, that this figure will share his or her taste or aesthetic experience with others.18 For Kant, the central problem or antinomy of taste is that we act as if everyone should agree with our taste (universal voice), despite the fact that we also know that there can be no agreement about taste as it is not based upon concepts. After all, Kant says, the ‘universal voice is only an idea’.19 Hans-Georg Gadamer describes this Kantian concentration on judgment and reception as a ‘radical subjectivization’ of the aesthetic.20 His chief criticism of this approach to aesthetics is that while it is designed to tell us about the most general and abstracted condition of the human subject, next to nothing is known about the aesthetic object. Perhaps downplaying the role of the artist and concentrating upon the importance and meaning of art reception risks this kind of oversight. Neither de Duve nor Krauss identify this shift from the organizing trope of art production to that of reception, or certainly it is not put in these explicitly aesthetic terms. But then this move towards reception flows quite logically from the rejection of a particular account of expression both on the part of the artists and these critics, namely that expression is the transmission of the feelings or inner state of the artist. Once this kind of expression is barred the emphasis shifts to reception, as indeed it should if the shift in practice minimalism inaugurates is to be properly understood.

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This emphasis on reception is combined with an analysis of the way in which the work of art relates to the contemporary state of subjectivity. In other words, Hegel’s contribution to Idealist aesthetics is also at work here. Hegel’s claim that art ‘presents man with himself ’ is reinvigorated for a postmodern age.21 Indeed, de Duve delivers an almost word-for-word reprise of this Hegelian account of aesthetic function: ‘one of the functions of contemporary art,’ he says, ‘is to construct models of the contemporary subject.’22 Now we get to the heart of the knotty problem of entanglement. Krauss and de Duve oscillate between locating the theory of the contemporary subject in the work itself, yet at the same time tracing its temporal and spatial unfolding through the spectator’s interaction with the work. Their theories of the subject are, as it were, both immanent in the work and yet set off by the interaction of the beholder with the work; which is to say that the spectator both completes the work of art and realizes it. To understand this entanglement I will begin with Krauss’ account of this theory of the subject because her analysis puts in place this way of thinking about minimalism.

3 K r a u s s , M e r l e a u - Po n t y a n d t h e s p a c e o f ex p e r i e n c e In the first instance, Krauss’s analysis locates the theory of the subject in minimalism itself; it is the dynamic agent that generates a modality of consciousness or of reality.23 For Krauss this model is akin to, if not identical with, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology. Krauss cites his idea that ‘the self is understood as completed only after it has surfaced into the world’ and then applies this theory to minimalist sculpture, which she says is ‘a metaphorical statement of the self understood only in experience’.24 Krauss demonstrates this argument with reference to Robert Morris’ Untitled L-Beams (1965–67), which is comprised of three large L-shaped forms made of plywood and painted pilgrim grey. They are installed to appear like three different shapes: one lies flat on the ground, one is upright and one is inverted like a chevron. According to Krauss, we know the L-Beams are the same shape – if nothing else the title tells us so – but it is difficult to actually experience them that way. We can’t immediately apprehend their sameness because of their scale and their deliberately confusing arrangement. They are larger than life-sized – approximately 8 feet by 8 feet – and thus too large when installed in a small space to see all at once. Krauss argues that they escape

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easy apprehension partly because they ‘suspend the axiomatic coordinates of an ideal space’.25 The ideal space of abstracted geometry would render them equivalent but only at the cost of experience. And according to Krauss they are situated firmly within the ‘space of experience’.26 For Krauss, this shift to the spectator’s experience makes such works ‘fully nonpsychological’27 and ‘completely post-Expressionist’.28 That is, the experience unfolding in the real time and space of the viewer voids or renders irrelevant any recourse to prior artistic intention as it simultaneously delivers the model of subjectivity minimalism contains. This model of the subject proceeds from the suspension of ideal space. By suspending ideal space, according to Krauss’ argument, the L-Beams suspend a traditional model of consciousness. The model that seems to guide her analysis, but which is not specifically identified as such, is the Kantian idea of a transcendental aesthetic; that is, that our innate senses of space and time are the conditions of possibility of sense experience in general.29 It is this priorness of space and the self that her version of minimalism questions. These works, she says, do not present us with ‘a fixed, internal armature that could mirror the viewer’s own self ’.30 If they mirror us at all, it is to show us our inner emptiness, while their outer form, which is the chief concern of Krauss, reveals only the unstable and fluctuating appearances that surround us. These shifting shapes nonetheless entrain or ‘magnetize’ the bodily self, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms.31 The body is aligned with their various arrangements and is thereby externalized or anchored by them in that space and at that moment, allowing what Krauss calls a ‘sense of coalescing in experience and of a realization of the self as it achieves externality’.32 But how do the subject and world coalesce? And what kind of self is capable of having this experience? Given that there is no inner armature, no prior sense of space and time, what ‘occult act’ to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms again, allows us to coalesce with and elaborate our environment?33 On these points Krauss is silent. However, her concern, on one level, is precisely with this strange moment of meeting of self and world that the L-Beams uncover – the space of experience. Krauss uses this expression, ‘the space of experience’, in a very Merleau-Pontian way. She says, somewhat enigmatically, that it is: ‘the space to which one’s own body appears, if it appears at all.’34 This makes perfect sense, however, if we look at Merleau-Ponty’s idea of primordial spatiality. For Merleau-Ponty the primordial space of experience is not the mundane experience of everyday life, what he terms the ‘already familiar world’.35

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Rather, it is an underlying level of spatiality that is only brought to conscious awareness when the familiar world recedes in dreams or disintegrates in pathological conditions or, as Krauss puts it, when ideal space is suspended. He calls this primordial experience of space a ‘blind adherence to the world’.36 For Merleau-Ponty such experience is aligned with prepersonal bodily being; a communication with the world more ancient than thought, it is prior to abstract space, to ideation, but makes them possible. In effect, he starts with the same question as Kant – How is the already familiar world possible? – but answers it by reversing Kant’s argument: experience becomes the condition of possibility of space, not the other way around. But this oneness of man and world, Merleau-Ponty says, ‘is repressed by everyday experience’.37 Here the bedrock or basis of experience is made very strange. Primordial spatiality is not, one might say, ego-syntonic. ‘Blind adherence’ is perhaps a better description of the coming into being of the subject of minimalism than Krauss’ notion of the self understood only in experience. Blind adherence captures the fact that Krauss’ model of the subject is never visible in the work of art itself. Despite her claim that the minimalist work is a metaphorical statement of this theory, this statement cannot be presented as such. In other words, we can’t actually see this model; we can only enact it. The self thus cannot be understood in the actual experience, we can only assemble a theory of co-constitution afterwards. This is precisely MerleauPonty’s point and maybe Krauss also adheres to this view to some degree. For Merleau-Ponty blind adherence emphasizes not our coalescence in experience but rather our fundamental contingency; that is, we are propelled bodily into the world without prior constitution, without an innate sense of space. This is echoed in Krauss: the spectator is plunged into an encounter with a work that refuses to give reassuring orientation and anchorage. Divested of ideal coordinates the spectator must feel something like the ‘giddiness’ that Merleau-Ponty says is our awareness of our underlying contingency.38 Certainly Krauss is understood by later commentators to be promoting precisely this radically contingent subjectivity.39 By stripping away the transcendental aesthetic that served to unify experience, we are, then, left rudderless, radically contingent and decentred. This is the familiar subject of postmodernism, the one that Alexander Alberro believes minimalism inaugurates by denying the operation of a facilitating transcendental. Contingency, however, should not be confused with relativism as so often happens in postmodern and contemporary analyses, although it is true that the shift to an aesthetics of reception exacerbates this risk. Indeed, it is now

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customary to entrench this problem of the unknowable reaction of the spectator still further by appending the qualifiers of race, sex or class, as Hal Foster does in his commentary on Krauss.40 But the essential problem of an aesthetics of reception – the privacy of meaning – is precisely what Krauss wants to avoid. For her, private, enclosed and possibly incommensurable meaning is to be tempered by public meaning – the shared horizons of language and embodiment. Nonetheless her work has opened the way for such analyses insofar as her account of the minimalist subject is anti-foundational. For Krauss, however, relativism is forestalled because while the subject is contingent, the meaning of minimalism is not. She doesn’t present her reading as if it is one among many – nobody does, despite postmodern pieties about pluralism. Rather, she presents it as if we should agree with her. For her, the work has a particular meaning, an intention perhaps – this would probably not be overstating the extent of the anthropomorphism – and in conformity with it the spectator acts. There is no contingency here, no room for relativism. She suggests the work has certain perceptual properties that should produce a similar reaction in all subjects. We know the work is in some way about our experience and perception because, as Merleau-Ponty indicates, we become aware of perception only when there is some ambiguity, and we would surely agree that the L-Beams are ambiguous. We know the work is not about the feelings of the artist, because the tone of the works is cool, even affectless.41 And, in any case, if there is any doubt one can refer back to the artist’s recorded intentions, which are regularly consulted despite their negation of artistic intention. This is not to say that everyone will seamlessly move from minimal affect and perceptual ambiguity to a theory of the subject unaided, but Krauss’ argument is certainly very compelling. And it is compelling because her reading is grounded in the expressive dimensions of the art itself, despite her protestations to the contrary. The account of expression I am using here is that of the philosopher Edward Casey. As I mentioned in the introduction, Casey explicitly rejects the idea that expression is the direct communication of the artist’s feelings – the predominant understanding of expression in art history, including that of Krauss and de Duve. By questioning the elision of expression and communication, he loosens the stranglehold expressionism seems to have on this particular term and offers another way of thinking about it. For Casey, expression is not about the production of art and nor is he concerned with the problems of reception; expression is an attribute of art

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considered as a phenomenon. His phenomenological approach is best understood as an aesthetics of the work. He argues against the idea that expression is a hidden or private meaning. In this rejection of hidden depth, the phenomenologies of Casey and Krauss converge. Expression, for Casey, is the ‘aesthetic surface’ of the work, which can be broken down into three components: the affective qualities of an aesthetic object, its perceptual qualities, and its import or meaning.42 To focus on such properties and their public quality is not to suggest there is one meaning – we would be well and truly out of the aesthetic domain if this was the case – but it does curb the worst excesses of postmodern voluntarist criticism unleashed by a too-close adherence to the ideal, rather than the idea, of contingency. Krauss, on the other hand, may in fact be too closely wedded to Casey’s phenomenological account of expression: the publicness of the work and its observable, verifiable properties are favoured over the spectator’s less predictable interaction with them. Her analysis thus puts into play an interesting tension between an aesthetics of reception and an aesthetics of the work, however in the final analysis she folds reception back into the work. Her reference to the spectator becomes only an elaboration of the work. The telltale signs are there in the idea that the work is a metaphorical statement of the theory of the subject, even though this doesn’t quite fit with the ultimately anti-optical trajectory of her work on sculpture.43 In other words, the work should only come to life at the moment of coalescence – this would faithfully follow Morris’ idea of aesthetic dispersion – but for Krauss this is also what the work intends. The problem that plagues her analysis is the return of intention, of priorness – in short, her failure to include the question of time. It is precisely the temporal dimension of minimalism that is made explicit by de Duve. His analysis, as the title of his article should indicate with ‘its plea for a new genre of theatre’, reworks aspects of Michael Fried’s analysis of minimalism, in particular Fried’s criticism of its temporal nature. In the process de Duve also addresses some of the contradictions in Krauss’ account, produced precisely by an absence of time.

4

D e D u ve, a n t h r o p o m o r p h i s m a n d t i m e

De Duve reads the geometric shapes of minimalism not in terms of a space of experience as Krauss does, but as a conflict of different temporal orders. The space of experience is the ‘immediate being-there’ that he argues our

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century has discovered is always harbouring representation.44 For him, then, geometric shapes, such as the cube or the L-beam, do not suspend ideal space in favour of the space of experience; rather, these types of spatiality are distinguished temporally. The time of ideation – the cognizance of geometric shape – is immediate, whereas the perceptual experience needed to verify this takes place over time. In other words, the idea of the shape and the actual exploration of it in time are out of sync. The conflict of the faculties – apprehension and reason – is a conflict of time. Minimalism, de Duve concludes, signals not the loss of the Kantian a priori – essentially Krauss’s argument – but, on the contrary, the positive recognition of this loss. The spectator, he explains, is compelled to produce a posteriori the conditions of experience already completed.45 The spectator is subjected to something like the layered spatial experience of Merleau-Ponty, but here the distinctions are made in time. The dissolution of self and world, personal and public, that Krauss’ argument constantly risks but forestalls, become for de Duve distinctions enacted in time.46 Most importantly, in de Duve’s analysis no awkward moment is posited before the ‘coalescence’ in experience; the self, such as it is, confronts the immediacy of shape and the delay of exploration. De Duve’s approach to minimalism also concedes the anthropomorphism that haunts Krauss’ account. He says there is ‘an anthropomorphism ... in all art ... the question is to know which anthropomorphism’.47 To discover what is distinctive about the anthropomorphism of minimalism, he argues, the questions to ask are: ‘Which kind of human representation does minimalism put into play, which heuristic model of man does it propose?’48 De Duve rejects Fried’s famous claim that the hollowness of minimalist works is what makes them ‘blatantly anthropomorphic’.49 He turns instead to Fried’s notion that the minimalist work of art is incomplete without the spectator and that the work confronts the spectator like a ‘surrogate person’.50 From these acute observations de Duve begins to develop his alternate account of minimalist anthropomorphism. He builds on the idea that minimalism is an encounter where the spectator is essential and reinterprets the personhood of minimalist sculpture to mean that the work functions as a metaphor for the self.51 He tracks the features of this encounter and the oddly ambivalent demands minimalist sculpture makes on the spectator: it addresses the spectator, includes them as an inhabitant,52 and yet reduces them to an object,53 while also spatially distancing and embracing them at one and the same time.54

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Minimalism, de Duve says, using Fried’s terms, ‘extorts’ complicity from the spectator.55 He departs from Fried, however, by claiming that the relations of complicity tie the spectator to the surrounding architecture, not to the minimalist sculpture.56 In this subtle move de Duve takes some distance from the idea that the anthropomorphism of minimalism is the attribution of agency to the sculpture, that this ‘surrogate person’ addresses us and has specific demands. ‘Demands’, ‘addresses’ – such terms are routinely used in art history to describe the accommodations a receptive viewer makes to the exigencies of different art practices. These terms, and our constant recourse to them, clearly indicate the ingrained and unavoidable nature of anthropomorphism. But Fried’s term ‘extorts’ is in a slightly different register: implicit to it is both violence and unwillingness. Indeed, Fried’s response to minimalist works, such as Tony Smith’s Die (1962), makes manifest an extreme form of anthropomorphism and a more profound entanglement of spectator and work. Smith’s large six-foot steel cube is at once obdurate in tone and yet scaled to engage the body. Fried has a decidedly paranoid reaction to the anthropomorphic work: it impinges upon him, crowding him out of the room as if it were a person.57 In his account, the work is not only animated but also accused of ‘aggressiveness’ and thus given something like an inner state.58 This reaction could be understood in psychoanalytic terms as situated in the domain of part-object relations and projection. That is, the feeling of persecution is attributed to the object; the object causes the feeling. Melanie Klein’s work tracks such confusions of inner and outer sensations, the sense of which we can quickly grasp in expressions such as the ‘hunger-causing-object’.59 Hunger can be experienced as if an object provokes it, rather than being an endogenous sensation: for example, the breast causes hunger. And on one level it does – the smell of the lactating breast may indeed regulate the infant’s appetite. Some truth about the object is found in paranoid projection: it is not simply a confusion of inner and outer, it is also the precondition of their meeting. Similarly, Fried’s paranoid reaction foregrounds the anthropomorphism of minimalism that de Duve’s analysis finally concedes. De Duve’s anthropomorphism, however, is very different. While he concedes the coercion of the beholder that Fried identifies, for de Duve this is not the crux of anthropomorphism. Coercion is not attributed to the bullying presence of an aggressive object; instead, it describes the way the beholder is positioned by the minimalist installation: according to de Duve, beholders are forced to see themselves

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as part of a ‘created situation’. It is how they perform in this created situation that is the key to de Duve’s notion of minimalist anthropomorphism. This relocation of anthropomorphism in the actions of the spectator may seem somewhat puzzling. It flows, however, from de Duve’s general definition of anthropomorphism, which is a radical departure from conventional understandings of the term. For de Duve, anthropomorphism is not about the attribution of human qualities to inanimate objects, it is a more general question about how subjectivity is presented and constructed in art. Anthropomorphism, then, is not something that can be avoided by making non-expressive art; it is linked in his analysis to the central function of art, namely to provide models of the contemporary subject. De Duve turns Fried’s interpretation of minimalism towards this end or purpose. He uses Fried’s analysis almost symptomatically, as though the points of tension and criticism Fried identifies – the necessity of the spectator, the work as a surrogate person – indicate the components necessary to think through the model of subjectivity offered by minimalism. De Duve is ultimately somewhat equivocal about this model, however his most sustained and striking example of the minimalist model of subjectivity is the black box. Hollow forms, such as Tony Smith’s Die and Black Box (1962), prompt de Duve to argue that cybernetics’ black-box provides the best model of ‘what man is to man’ today.60 Here he follows Krauss and the rejection of private, interior meaning and proposes a subject knowable only through surface exchanges ‘with the world and others’.61 The minimalist work is then, as it is in Krauss, a metaphor for the self, and yet a metaphor or model that can only be fully realized by the spectator’s actions.62 De Duve departs from Krauss’ position most dramatically in his understanding of these actions. The motile spectator apprehending the different aspects of the work does not coalesce in experience. Rather, he or she is divided by these different views. As de Duve puts it: ... when the spectator turns around the object and grasps it in its differences, he is attending his own differentiation, a becoming-other which is not the sudden astonishment in front of an alienating mirror, but a passive process resulting from his own actions.63

The spectator in this account must accept the work as a metaphor of the self such that the differences of the work become his or hers. It follows then that if these perceptual or experiential differences cannot be synthesized into a whole, so too the self that takes this voyage around the object, or objects,

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cannot attain unity either. If Krauss’ analysis strives for the moment of coconstitution of spectator and work, de Duve’s analysis traces instead their mutual failure to cohere, their unravelling through performance. The blackbox subject is then simply the sum of such performed actions or, as de Duve puts it, ‘the human subject would define himself as the integral of his performances’.64 In other words, the beholder in the ‘created situation’ enacts this definition of subjectivity. Having developed one account of the model of subjectivity, this performative black-box model, de Duve ultimately concludes by arguing that the philosophy of the subject of minimalism is yet to be written. The clues he offers for thinking about this subject are mainly posed in terms of what it is not. For example, the model is not phenomenological, as Krauss contends or, rather, to be more specific, the model of the subject is not derived from Heidegger’s particular approach to phenomenology. De Duve states: We no longer have confidence in the Kantian model of transcendental subject, constituted by the a priori of space and time. But we no longer trust distrust either; we do not think any longer of ourselves according to the model, say, Heideggerian, of the existential subject for whom his Da-Sein is above all an irremediable absence to himself and to the world.65

De Duve presents here an interesting challenge for future thinking about the minimalist subject. He is sceptical about both the Kantian subject with innate spatial and temporal capacities and the phenomenological subject predicated on the absence of the self and such capacities. How then do we approach the minimalist subject? De Duve does not solve the dilemma he creates, however by embracing the anthropomorphism of minimalism and showing the need to move beyond the radical contingency of Krauss, his argument points the way towards thinking again and more deeply about the shifting nature of subjectivity in art. If this challenge and the recuperation of the question of subjectivity are de Duve’s brilliant achievements, there is also a regrettable loss that is a byproduct of his argument. In his reworking of anthropomorphism – its primary location in the actions of the subject rather than the demands of the art object – we also lose sight of the strange and interesting consequences of the refiguring of reception. In other words, by aligning anthropomorphism with the performative aspects of reception – the spectator enacts the theory of the subject – the peculiar power of these works to magnetize the body, or demand

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this performance, is diminished. Minimalism becomes the arena for the staging of a new genre of theatre – the drama of the contemporary subject – but the consequence is that minimalist objects melt into the background as props. How do we reconcile this account of minimalism with the claim that these works anticipate or regulate the viewer’s movements, as Krauss does, or that this new power can be experienced as aggression, as Fried does? The primary locus of meaning is clearly very different in these two ways of understanding the anthropomorphism of minimalism. Putting the spotlight on the performance of the viewing subject is at the expense of the minimalist objects and, in turn, emphasizing the object’s power to entrain the subject is at the expense of the subject’s agency. The entanglement of beholder and work of art, however, is clearly present in both accounts but figured differently: in Krauss it turns on the subject’s blind adherence to the work’s intentions; in de Duve the subject blindly performs the work’s meaning. Considered together, these largely incompatible accounts nonetheless reveal the labile quality of subjectivity in late modern art. They generate further questions about both the uncertain location of subjectivity and the new role of the spectator. Such questions are alive in much contemporary installation practice. The complicated entanglement of viewer and work that minimalism launched is celebrated in the idea of immersive video installations and interactive work. In art history, however, these questions are lost, or rather they have been occluded by the particular way in which minimalism has been historicized. To conclude by returning to where I began, in Alexander Alberro’s statements about the first steps towards dismantling subjectivity we can see the effects of this process of historicization. Minimalism is reduced to an ‘important step’ in the evolution of certain anti-subjective or anti-expressive art practices and, in this reduced form, is a crucial touchstone for evaluation and judgment. More specifically, it is commonly used to determine which practices qualify as ‘advanced practices’ in late-twentieth and early twentyfirst century art. Minimalism is then positioned (erroneously I believe) as the beginning of an anti-aesthetic tradition.66 Here I am not disputing the fact that minimalism effects a radical break with certain aesthetic ideas, nor am I claiming it was easily accommodated within the critical vocabulary that was then available. What I do want to question is the idea that a critique of some ideas necessarily puts into doubt the pertinence of a whole body of philosophical thought.

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To calibrate the achievements of minimalism more precisely we could say that it questioned the expressionist theory of art, but not expression in toto. It questioned one account of the subject, but not subjectivity in general. It questioned the focus upon the artist’s hidden thoughts and feelings, but not the whole question of intention. And these various moves have important consequences, one of which is the shift of focus away from production and on to the work and its reception. In turn, one of the curious results of this shift is the transposition of traditional aesthetic questions about production, such as intention and expression, to the work of art itself. Aesthetic problems seem to have a hydra-like indestructibility so that when they are curtailed in one place they reappear in another. There are no simple solutions to the rise of the spectator and the anthropomorphic work of art and what they mean for the assessment of art, but to fully engage with the implications of these changes requires the broader view of aesthetics. We can certainly conclude that the tension between Krauss’ and de Duve’s anthropomorphisms flows from the shift away from production as the primary locus of meaning and the uncertainty this produces. Without the anchorage point of the artist and his or her intentions, both expression and subjectivity are unfixed from their traditional locations. An aesthetics of the work, such as Krauss’ approach, ultimately favours their reinscription in the work. An aesthetics of reception, such as de Duve’s, reinscribes them in the dynamic of performance. Whether or not these different aesthetic approaches can be reconciled is a question for the future. It is only within the framework of aesthetics, however, that we can fully appreciate such radical changes in art practice; changes, which de Duve rightly insists, we have not finished interpreting.67

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Feeling and Late Modern Art

The enjoyment of beauty has a peculiar, mildly intoxicating quality of feeling ... The science of aesthetics investigates the conditions under which things are felt as beautiful, but it has been unable to give any explanation of the nature and origin of beauty ... Psychoanalysis, unfortunately, has scarcely anything to say about beauty either. Freud1

Psychoanalysis may have little to say about beauty, but surely it has much to say about feeling, mildly intoxicating or otherwise. It is around the concept of feeling, rather than the enjoyment of beauty, that one would expect the most productive confluence of aesthetics and psychoanalysis in the modern and contemporary period. The visual art of this period can no longer be summated by the concept of beauty, but feeling remains an ineradicable part of the aesthetic encounter, the ready-made notwithstanding. It is of course ‘anaesthetic’ works, such as Marcel Duchamp’s most infamous ready-made, Fountain (1917), that are often cited as evidence that aesthetics and art have long parted company, and that a general theory of art, such as aesthetics is expected to provide, is now next to impossible. If a urinal purchased in a plumbing supply shop can be presented as art, albeit with a signature (R. Mutt in this case, not even the artist’s) and a title (Fountain), where are the limits of art? Duchamp clearly intended to challenge the traditional aesthetic ideals of beauty, feeling and taste. He declared: ‘this choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anesthesia.’2 In the wake of 29

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the ready-made, aesthetics may no longer be able to provide general concepts of art along the lines of beauty and sublimity, but the themes and issues it has identified as significant nonetheless live on, even if only (or perhaps especially) in the breach. The identification of the importance of feeling in art is one of those things that lives on, despite all expectations to the contrary. Taking Fountain as an intractable example, while its selection eschewed taste and feeling, it still generated feelings such as anger, outrage, disgust and amusement. My aim in this chapter is to consider how art history might use psychoanalysis and aesthetics to approach the question of feeling in late modern art. The confluence of psychoanalysis and aesthetics is not only the most promising site for creating this approach, it becomes an essential site of methodological generation given that from the latter half of the twentieth century art history itself has had little to say about feeling.3 In art-historical writings the heyday of this concept lies in the past in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The affective dimension of art was a vital concern in empathy theory and Aby Warburg’s work on expressive form, but in more recent art history it has all but disappeared. In the late modern period there are three reasons for this neglect of feeling. Firstly it is the result of a methodological blindspot – the dominant social historical or semiological/poststructuralist approaches to art do not consider the communicative function of feeling. Secondly, the divorce of art history from aesthetics has led to the neglect of what might be termed traditional aesthetic concerns. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the neglect of feeling is due to the rise of what I shall call the anaesthetic ideal in art, exemplified by minimalism and conceptual art; that is, at the level of authorial intent the desire to express no feeling. The task of resuscitating the question of feeling, then, is more difficult than it might first appear. The problem is further compounded when we turn to psychoanalysis and its efforts to understand the nature and function of feeling.

1

f e e li n g i n p s yc h o a n a l y s i s a n d a e s t h e t i c s

Strangely, while feeling is in one sense the currency of psychoanalytic practice, it is also one of its most elusive concepts. Freud acknowledged this lacuna when he discussed psychoanalysis’ affective touchstone: anxiety. In ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’ (1926) he describes anxiety as an affective

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state that is felt. That much is clear and straightforward, although Freud adds the curious rider: ‘although we are also ignorant of what an affect is.’4 The French psychoanalyst André Green reiterates this same point, arguing that we still do not have a satisfactory theory of affects at our disposal.5 Green’s work has done much to draw attention to the problematic status of affect in psychoanalytic theory. He has continually stressed the difficulties involved in defining the nature of affects and of building ‘a realistic portrait’ of them, while also underscoring the importance of affects for understanding psychic life.6 He argues that affect is what is ‘irreducibly particular, most singularly individual about that individual’.7 His work returns to Freud, tracing the incomplete and contradictory nature of Freud’s different approaches to affect and its vicissitudes. Green keeps alive the tensions and problems of Freud’s account while also suggesting further ways of thinking about affect. For my purposes three aspects of Green’s work are particularly useful: his examination of the different relationships between affect and representation, his development of the links between the body, language and affect that are nascent in Freud’s work, and his idea that affect has a dimension of futurity; that is, it functions as a form of anticipation. He argues that the affective process is ‘the anticipation of a meeting between the subject’s body and another body (imaginary or present)’.8 I will return to these points in greater detail in the final section of this chapter. I want to turn now to the position of feeling in aesthetics. Whereas in psychoanalysis there is a persistent sense of the enigma of feeling and its vicissitudes, in aesthetics feeling is mostly taken for granted rather than explained. One can see this most clearly in one of the classical texts of aesthetic feeling – Kant’s third critique. For Kant, while the feeling of pleasure unalloyed by interest is of central importance in the subject’s response to beauty, it is nonetheless not a key concern in itself. Rather, the feeling is taken as evidence that there is something more at play; what lies behind and causes the feeling is the central concern. Its cause is traced back to an interaction of the subject’s faculties – namely the free play of imagination and understanding.9 Later debates about feeling in art have questioned Kant’s anchorage of feeling primarily in the viewing subject, however such debates continue to focus on the location of feeling rather than its nature. In other words, the questions that preoccupy aesthetics are whether feelings originate with the artist or whether they are in the work, in the response of the beholder, or an indeterminate combination of all three. These debates about the affective

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dimension of art have largely taken place under the aegis of a concern about the nature of expression in art, a concern that links aestheticians as diverse as Hans-Georg Gadamer, Mikel Dufrenne, Susanne Langer, John Dewey, Edward Casey, and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The concern with expression is often referred to as the ‘expressive theory of art’. In art history, as opposed to aesthetics, the expressive theory of art is understood to mean that art is an expression of the artist’s feelings.10 This particular version of the expressive theory of art is then presumed to have a use-by date, normally circa 1960. While I am certainly not of that view, the reduction of the complexity of expression to one account has eclipsed some of the other limitations that make these theories difficult to apply to art post1960. The most pertinent limitation is that most accounts of expression tend to presume continuity between the affect of the work and its reception. One can see this quite clearly in the work of Edward Casey. He has a very useful phenomenological account of expression that I examined in the previous chapter. To reiterate, he explicitly rejects the idea of expression as the direct communication of the artist’s feelings. Expression for him is a property of the aesthetic object. He argues against the idea that the aesthetic object conveys feeling or thought; these are ingredients of the object itself. Expression for Casey is the aesthetic surface of the work, which can be broken down into three components: the affective qualities of an aesthetic object, its perceptual qualities, and its import or meaning.11 While one might want to disagree with the premature foreclosure of the relationship between artist and work, Casey’s analysis of the components of expression is highly generalizable; it is difficult to imagine a work of art that escapes the net of this description. Where Casey’s account becomes problematic is around the function of the affective dimension of a work of art. He argues that it enables the cohesiveness of expression and the continuity between subject and object.12 It is around this last point that his theory can easily be contested. For example, the affective tone of minimalist works is cool, even affectless, but the reaction of critics was not uniformly continuous with the tone of the work. One of the most infamous negative reactions to minimalism is of course from the critic and art historian Michael Fried, who referred to minimalist sculpture as aggressive.13 Clearly the absence of feeling in a work of art does not guarantee it will not generate feeling. Another example of a mismatch between the tone of the work and the reaction of some viewers is offered by the conceptual artist Hans Haacke’s

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Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971). The affective tone of this work can also be described as deliberately cool, or even neutral, despite, or perhaps because, the subject matter is far from unaffecting. The work charts the holdings of slum housing of one family – the Shapolskys. The housing in Harlem and the Lower East Side in Manhattan, mainly rented by African Americans and Puerto Ricans, was not well maintained and hence gave a good return on investment. The Shapolskys had been prosecuted previously for rent gouging – buying and selling within the same group of businesses to raise rent. In Shapolsky et al. Haacke graphically represents this network of sales. The work consists of two maps, six charts, and 142 photographs of properties with details of location, ownership, value, mortgages and so forth listed below. All information presented by Haacke was taken from public records. Rosalyn Deutsche points out that social issues such as these normally appear in museums in the style of liberal social documentary that Allan Sekula calls the ‘find-a-bum school of concerned photography’.14 Haacke does not attempt to elicit sympathy in this way; rather, his work mimics the objective language of sociological reports or news reporting: non-sensational external images of slum housing surmounted by factual explanatory text. Like many of Haacke’s more pointedly critical works, Shapolsky et al. was refused exhibition. It was originally proposed for a 1971 show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, but was cancelled the week before the exhibition was to open. The museum’s director claimed that the work was too ‘specific’ and that the role of art was not to show individual wrongdoings.15 In the case of minimalism it is not clear that aggressiveness belongs to the object, whereas anger could easily be considered an aspect of Haacke’s work. The anger about slum landlords that might have motivated the project, however, is not exactly continuous with the tone of the work or the anger of art administrators about the mixing of art and politics. Clearly continuity of subject and object needs to be supplemented by a concern for discontinuities between the tone of the work of art and its reception, and the different objects of affect created by different kinds of reception. What can be usefully taken from aesthetics, however, is the importance of thinking about the different locations of affect. From this brief sketch of the status of feeling in aesthetics and psychoanalysis it would seem that this potential confluence of psychoanalysis and aesthetics is far from straightforward. One cannot apply psychoanalytic accounts of feeling to aesthetics or the study of art because there is no coherent theory

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to apply. Similarly, one cannot use aesthetic accounts of feeling to amplify psychoanalytic conceptions of affect, as there are no such fine-grained or detailed accounts. How, then, do we begin to investigate this aspect of art?

2

parallel method

Thierry de Duve suggests that the best way to combine psychoanalysis and art is by a method of parallelism.16 His approach does not apply concepts from one domain to the other – what he refers to in shorthand as ‘Da Vinci after Freud’ or ‘Freud according to Cézanne’. Instead, he explores how the two disciplines share common concerns, interpretative goals or methods.17 The parallels that interest him (among others) are: the similarity of the dreamwork to the form-generating work of the avant-garde artist, the centrality of self-analysis and self-referentiality to both the invention of psychoanalysis and the progress of art, and the inaccessibility of the object of knowledge (whether the analysand’s desire or the work of art) except through subjective experience and transference.18 There are two parallels that might help us to explore the affective dimension of art. First, the concern in aesthetics with feeling and form can be regarded as analogous to the psychoanalytic concern with affect and words. Joyce McDougall argues that affects and words are the two fundamental elements of psychic structure.19 While the psychic economy may aim to bring them together, they are both subject to vicissitudes; for example, words (or the ideas they represent) may be repressed or disavowed, the affect suppressed or strangulated. Where the parallel has particular force and explanatory power is for the art, such as minimalism, that attempts to sunder the link between form and feeling. Expressive accounts of feeling have little purchase on this art; such accounts generally presume a link between form and feeling, a link that psychoanalysis clearly takes to be an achievement rather than an inevitability. By assuming that these elements can be split apart, psychoanalysis provides a more nuanced framework for thinking about their operation in life and art. I will return to this particular example of post-60s art in greater detail in the final section of the chapter as this difficult case best exemplifies how the parallel method works most effectively. The second key parallel is that psychoanalytic practice is highly attuned to the importance of affect but approaches it without a ready-made theory of its actual meaning or specific operation in relation to an individual analysand.

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This is not to say that there are no theories of affect in psychoanalysis, no parameters for understanding its operation or non-operation, however there is an overriding sense that its meaning and function are something to be discovered rather than given in advance. This openness to the operation of affect would distinguish a psychoanalytic approach to affect from that of aesthetics, which seems bent on assigning affect to a particular place. The parallel here is more prescriptive: the art critic or art historian should attend to the affective register with evenly-spaced attention but not rush to impose any one particular theory. This parallel where both psychic life and art are comprised of fundamental elements, which are best summarized as representation and affect, brings to the fore the idea that art, like psychoanalysis, deals broadly with the domain of the subjective in all its variability and complexity. Gyorgy Markus makes this point very clearly. He argues that the ‘rather vacuous notion of authorial intention is not particularly useful for exegetical or explanatory purposes. Its genuine accomplishment consists in something else: it firmly situates the significance of an artwork in the sphere of subjectivity’.20 Now, this location of the significance of the work of art in the sphere of subjectivity may seem to do violence to works such as Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. that follow documentary protocols and aim to reveal conditions in the world. It is this aim, however, and our recourse to it, that situates the work in the sphere of subjectivity and makes it amenable to an aesthetic analysis. This does not mean it is then divested of political meaning and treated as a mere appearance, as caricatured accounts of formalist aesthetics might suggest. Rather, it means that despite the fact that at the level of style it does not attempt to reveal the inner feelings of the artist, its mode of communication is still subjective insofar as we understand it to be the work of a particular artist – unlike, say, advertising or much newspaper reporting. From this it follows that expression – affective tone, perceptual elements, import or meaning – is at some level intentional, or that these elements can be analysed as aesthetic decisions. And, in fact, analysing Haacke’s work in this mode, and attending to affect, can draw out some of the interesting contradictions involved with the work’s reception and meaning that are not evident if it is assumed the work is anti-expressive. To be open to the operation of affect like an analyst does not mean, however, that the critic takes up the position of analyst or treats the work of art as an analysand or symptom. While there are many ways in which psychoanalysis is applied to art, underlying most of them is this model of critic as

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analyst, and work of art as akin to an analysand. In this regard, Jean-François Lyotard’s summary of six key psychoanalytic approaches to art is instructive. He shows how all but one approach puts the critic in the position of analyst, with variations only at the level of which psychic phenomena the work of art is assumed to embody or present for analysis. For example, the work of art might be conceived as a symptomatic expression of the drives (of author or subject) or as a process of mourning for the lost object. 21 The exception – his own approach – reverses the terms and looks at how the work of art participated in the formation of psychoanalysis. The symptomatic approach to art is a remnant of Freud’s now deeply unpopular psychobiographical approach – called ‘the pathographical approach’ by Jack Spector – where art is used to analyse the artist.22 Few art historians today would subscribe to this method. There is little interest in the origins of creativity, and even less in attempting to read off artists’ specific psychopathologies from their work. Nonetheless, the position of analyst in relation to the work of art remains. Even when it is representation on the couch, when it is seen as a ‘psychical event’, which is by far the most common approach, there is the sense that the critic is the analyst observing and interpreting this event.23 When affect is included in the analysis of works of art this position of mastery is necessarily ceded. This last point can be best illustrated by following the contrast between affect in analysis and affect in the interpretation of the work of art. In the case of the work of art, there is a kind of open-endedness that can be seen most clearly from the perspective of clinical psychoanalysis. To de Duve’s method of parallelism we can add the method of contrast.

3

method of contrast

The contrast turns on Freud’s distinction between interpretation and construction in psychoanalysis. Sarah Kofman notes that Freud limits the application of the term ‘interpretation’ to details or, as he terms them, ‘single element[s] of the material’, 24 while the term ‘construction’ is assigned to the overall account that the analyst presents to the subject. Is there an equivalent of construction in the interpretation of the work of art? Construction could refer to the broader framework in which the interpretation of ideas, forms and feelings is inserted. So, for example, art that represents or uses body matter to shock and/or disgust can be related to abjection;

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performance art that involves self-mutilation can be framed in terms of masochism; self-display can be situated within the structure of narcissism, and so forth. These constructions by the art critic or historian are partly addressed to the work, but more importantly they are addressed to the public. The works of art would generally be assumed to be about these psychological categories rather than simply symptomatic of them; the work is accorded a knowingness that downplays the role of construction. Construction, then, is not revealing the unconscious of the work of art, or indeed the inarticulable; at most, it might be bringing to the surface an implicit theme. Generally speaking, these constructions work at the level of ideas and there is little reckoning with the other key aspect of psychic structure: affect. There are always multiple and competing constructions, and what allows open-endedness is the absence of a psychoanalytic relation to test the truth of these constructions. Here the contrast comes clearly into view. Freud was confident of the truth of his psychoanalytic constructions because they not only coherently assembled the fragments of the analysis, but also because they could be tested by the dynamic interplay between analyst and analysand. It is the latter dynamic that is clearly absent in the case of art criticism. Kofman draws out this point when she notes that Freud was much more tentative about the truth of his readings of works of art: In a text or a work of art, the fragments of the past are given once and for all and are essentially symbolic in character: no analytic relation obtains which would make possible a repetition of affects through transference. What is more, neither the heroes nor the author of a work free associate in the analyst’s presence. And finally, the analyst’s construction cannot be confirmed by effects produced on the author, either because he is dead, or because he reacts to the construction put forth by denying or rejecting it.25

For my purposes, the key point is that the investigation of affects in the analytic situation is facilitated by their repetition in the transference. The affect is embodied in the present, both literally and metaphorically. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. Affects are conceptualized in psychoanalysis as borderline concepts, like the drives, that are between the somatic and the psychic. However, unlike the drives, which we cannot perceive directly, affects involve the body as a feedback mechanism; the face plays the key role, reporting not only to others, but also to the self.26 It is no accident then that Freud removed his face from the analytic encounter. Without this crucial

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touchstone there is more room for the free play of the analysand’s imagination and understanding – in other words, for transference. It is here that the analogy of analyst (viewer) and analysand (work of art) breaks down. In the experience of the work of art there is no way to use transference to triangulate the encounter between viewer and work, and thus the interpretation of affect in the work of art remains necessarily more openended, its meaning necessarily more indeterminate. In other words, there is no transferential relation that could represent the ideas and feelings in another form, which could verify our understanding of them; their symbolic presentation admits no further translation. The viewer is like the analysand who cannot determine whether their feelings and perceptions are in the present or the past, in themselves or the object. Kofman broaches this issue of the viewer–patient in a slight corrective of Freud’s ideas of the limits of construction when applied to the work of art. She notes that: ... though it is true that the text does not ‘react’ to an analysis and that the author is not changed by it, the public, by contrast, has a significant affective response that can play the role of the patient’s emotional fragments and that proves that the work is an offshoot of the repressed. The associations are made on the one hand by Freud, which is why his texts on art often seem to be written in a confused fashion, but in fact obey a profound logic. On the other hand, free association is played out by the context of the work, as well as by the other works of the author. Finally and most importantly, the work of art, unlike the dream or the neurotic symptom – and this is what fundamentally distinguishes it from them – is a cultural production. Since the author’s unique past is at play in the work and must have the power to move all men, it is never prescribed as such, for here the idiosyncratic must at the same time be the most typical.27

Kofman’s account certainly acknowledges the fragmentation of the patient’s role and the splitting of the analyst’s role. The viewer or critic is both responding to the patient/work of art and in their place, insofar as the critic’s affective response must do duty for the repetition of affects through transference. Clearly Freud too, in free-associating with the work of art, tipped over the line into the patient’s position. Kofman guards against the diffusion of affect or its non-correspondence with the text by insisting that the work of art must move all men, presumably equally and in the same way. The risk of feelings being simply idiosyncratic and thus non-communicable, or enigmatic

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to all but the artist, is defrayed by the assertion that in the case of the artist’s feelings, the idiosyncratic must also be typical. Anyone who reads art criticism knows that this idea of art moving all people in the same way and to the same degree is very rarely true. In the assessment of late modern art and contemporary art of any significance, there is nothing like the univocal correspondence between work of art and viewer that Kofman presumes here. There is, however, a sense in which she is right to insist on the communicability of feeling, as against Kant’s proposition that we can only presume or act as if others feel as we do. There are certainly limits to the interpretation of feeling in art. No one would say that minimalism is an expression of joy, or that the work of Robert Smithson is about disgust. Similarly, one can observe constellations of interpretation forming round particular artists’ work that form a coherent field of attributed feelings – a ballpark estimation, if you like, of possible feeling states that might fit with a work. To backtrack, then, the fact that the viewer’s experience of the work of art may be transferential, while certainly resonating with their particular psychology and creating a higher level of ambiguity than in the clinical situation, does not necessarily mean that the response is invalid. Indeed, de Duve, as I noted earlier, sees the transferential response to the work of art as irreducible. If there is no such resonance with the work of art we would not be interested in it. Furthermore, the fact that a transferential relation to the work of art is idiosyncratic, that it is refracted through the particularities of the viewing subject, is, at one level, barely any different to a non-transferential relationship. Where it might more forcefully come into play is around taste – it informs what art interests us, and what does not. Transference, we might say, is an unavoidable feature of loving art. The negative view, however, would be that a transferential relation to the work of art is characterized by projection rather than perception, that our view is clouded by our particular psychology. An affective reaction to a work of art might then be viewed as only transferential, merely our projection and thus utterly personal and idiosyncratic. Certainly a fear such as this might account for the neglect of affect in art-historical discourse. The discipline is haunted by the Kantian split between feeling and concept where taste and feeling apparently still cannot be the subject of argument. But there is no reason to suppose that feelings are any more or less personal than ideas. On the contrary, evolutionary accounts of affects suggest that they are hard-wired into the human system. It is the connections between

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constellations of ideas and feelings that pose the greatest challenge and that are subject to the greatest variance, which brings us back to the contributions of psychoanalysis. It is by following the psychoanalytic insights about the vicissitudes of affect relative to representation that the shift in the affective economy of late modern art can be best illuminated.

4 zo m b i e a r t: A n d r é G r e e n , a f f e c t a n d representation The aim of the artist would not be to instruct the viewer but to give him information ... One would follow one’s predetermined premise to its conclusion, avoiding subjectivity. Chance, taste or unconsciously remembered forms would play no part in the outcome. The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of the premise. Sol LeWitt 28

It is descriptions of the anti-subjective aims of late modern art, such as Sol LeWitt’s, that lend considerable support to Fredric Jameson’s idea that the late modern period is characterized by a ‘waning of affect’.29 Jameson traces the beginning of this shift in sensibility to the late 1950s and early 1960s, which he correlates with the end of the modern movement. Certainly the anaesthetic sensibility gathers force in this period, however there is a much longer history of this tendency in modern art. Georges Bataille, for example, identifies a cold, unfeeling attitude in the work of the nineteenth-century painter Edouard Manet. Bataille draws attention to Manet’s ‘callous indifference’ to the tragic subject matter in his painting of the execution of Maximilian.30 The scene of the killing, Bataille says, is rendered as casually as if the participants were about to ‘buy a bunch of radishes’ and Maximilian is likened to ‘a tooth deadened by Novocain’.31 A history of this anaesthetic sensibility in modern art practice has yet to be written, however a substantial contribution to this idea is provided by Martin Jay’s essay, ‘Modernism and the specter of psychologism’. In this essay Jay shows that the desire to suppress subjective expressivity in art practice is linked to a similar desire in philosophical discourse that gathered strength at the end of nineteenth century – the desire to exorcize what he calls ‘the specter of psychologism’. In particular, Jay points to T. S. Eliot’s advocacy of an aesthetic of ‘impersonality’ and Duchamp’s rejection of an ‘aesthetic of expressivity’ as indicative of this more generalized anti-psychologism.32

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What Jay notes but does not emphasize is that in art practice the particular subjective quality that is singled out for excision is feeling. The persistence of this desire to eliminate or minimize feeling in art can also be seen in the innumerable terms used to describe it. In literature Barthes calls it ‘writing degree zero’;33 in painting Leo Steinberg calls it ‘ascetic passion’.34 For the art of the 1950s Moira Roth coined the very apt term ‘the aesthetic of indifference’ to describe the shared sensibility of the Cunningham–Cage– Rauschenberg–Johns circle.35 Wilhelm Worringer appeared to have something similar in mind when in 1908 he identified the turning away from empathy, vitality and life, which he called the urge towards abstraction in art. According to Worringer, when a beautiful object elicits empathy we project vital feeling into it; with abstraction, however, we yearn for the object purified of life.36 He argues that both impulses address our ‘need for self-alienation’: in empathy we lose ourselves in the object, in abstraction we seek deliverance from the arbitrariness of existence.37 In Worringer’s account we have twin poles of artistic expression; that is, empathy and vitality versus abstraction and the inanimate – the life drive and death drive of art. Recent publications have stressed the equation of the death drive and modern culture, and certainly destructiveness and desire for nothingness seem to be amenable to this interpretation.38 However, what this ignores is that in some works it is not so much a desire for no thing, but a desire for just the thing or the idea unencumbered by feeling. How can this trend be understood? Is it possible to eradicate the affective dimension of art, and what can psychoanalysis tell us about this? Minimalism is a particularly good example of this desire for the thing itself. It represents one of the most radical examples of the anaesthetic sensibility, rivalled in recent times only by conceptual art. Using industrial materials, methods and ready-made modules (such as fluorescent lights in the case of Dan Flavin, or bricks in the case of Carl Andre), minimalism comes as close to the idea of the mere thing, outside our uses and purposes, as it is possible to imagine in art practice. Early criticism was unified in its registration of the massive expressive or affective shift that was the result of this desire, but diverged radically when attempting to explain the shift. Three mutually-exclusive judgments or positions on the affective tone of minimalism can be drawn out of the literature. First, minimalist works are judged to be cool, cold or affectless and thus characterized by a negative sensibility: impersonality, impassivity, withdrawal, rejection and denial. Barbara Rose, for example, argues the works ‘resist’ interpretation and are intentionally ‘vacant or vacuous’.39 Invoking the

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Nirvana principle, she contends that the works deny ego and personality, striving instead for an anonymous, inert state without feeling: a ‘passionless nirvana’ or a ‘semihypnotic state of blank consciousness’.40 The second approach argues that the works are characterized by negative affects: they are boring and/or aggressive. Michael Fried, as noted earlier, is a key proponent of the idea that minimalist objects demonstrate aggressiveness. The third approach argues that the works generate new positive affects. John Perreault, for example, argues that the works are not affectless: Minimal art, in spite of the polemics, is emotional, but the emotions and experiences involved are new and unexpected. It must be remembered that the rational and the conceptual are also capable of evoking emotion. There is also the emotion and the aesthetic pleasure of efficiency and clarity and of surprising proportions.41

Lawrence Alloway similarly writes in defence of the subjective qualities of precision: ‘the systematic and the patient could be regarded as no less idiosyncratic and human than the gestural and cathartic.’42 A slight variation on this theme is the transformation of negative states into positive ones. Frances Colpitt has noted that some critics turned negative feelings such as boredom into positive values. She cites William Rubin’s claim that ‘[e]ven ennui can be turned into the substance of major art, while “noble” emotions can and have provided more than their share of failed paintings’.43 She also notes one critic’s frustration in being unable to discern ‘the much-conjured positive boredom’ in Carl Andre’s work.44 These three positions are not necessarily distinct and many articles seem to combine contradictory responses in a manner worthy of Freud’s ‘kettle logic’.45 For example, Max Kozloff calls minimalism ‘zombie art’, suggesting that he views minimalism as dead or deadening, and yet he also argues that the works are aggressive.46 Perreault similarly describes Robert Morris’ works as ‘subliminal in their aggressiveness’, while also asserting that minimalism as a whole can be characterized as pleasurable.47 Brian O’Doherty argues that minimalist objects ‘pretend to be inert or non-emotional’ but, despite the pretence, they had sufficient force to disqualify or disallow the question: ‘What am I supposed to feel?’48 He also adheres to the idea of their affectlessness, calling this inertness a state of ‘marvelous paralysis’. This paralysis, he continues, ‘has reduced some criticism to phenomenology’.49 From this brief survey it would appear that the artists’ aim to present just the thing itself unencumbered by feeling was not uniformly perceived as such

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in the early literature. In fact, these works, which art history has subsequently grouped together precisely by this shared aim, produced a remarkably diverse array of affective responses when they were initially exhibited. The absence of the usual markers of affect and personality – gesture, style, facture, and so forth – led not to a concentration on the object (the intended result), but rather an affective reaction to the withdrawal of these markers. This withdrawal of previously expected components of art was seen as aggressive, boring, a state of nirvana, a source of new pleasure and a shift towards the perceptual and embodied experience of art delineated by phenomenology. In other words, the idea of withdrawal produced a range of affective responses. What we can see very clearly here is that the relationship between stimulus and response, or idea and affect, is subject to a great deal of variability. A similar finding was noted in an experiment conducted by the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins. Tomkins recorded the verbal responses of subjects to the administration of an electric shock – a stimulus that most people would think could only be experienced as unpleasant. Tomkins noted the extraordinary catalogue of responses, with comments ranging from the predictable – ‘Feels like when Papa spanked’, ‘Ouch, that startles you ... didn’t hurt’ and ‘It makes you sort of angry the first time’ – through to highly unpredictable responses such as ‘I like the shocks’ or ‘Oh, Lord, I’m falling asleep’.50 To think, then, about the affective dimension of late modern art requires attention to not only the dissonance between the tone of the work and the response of the viewer, but also the variability of affective responses to the same or similar representations and ideas. This variability, of course, diminishes as art-historical orthodoxy takes over and beholders’ affective responses are guided towards the well-worn tracks that scholarship has provided. However, to see the attainment of orthodoxy as a process of acclimatization or habituation to avant-garde practices, as if this diminishment of variety is a positive accomplishment, is to mistake affective ossification for truth and beauty finally unveiled. To keep alive a more complex and generative topography of feeling, the variable relationships between affect and representation should be emphasized rather than finessed. In short, we need to focus on the relationship between representation and affective response as a potential site of disagreement and dispute. This is where the new importance ascribed to affect in the work of André Green is especially useful. Green’s work aims not only to compensate for the neglect of affect in psychoanalysis, but also to address the neglected

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relationship between representation and affect. Indeed, part of his overall project is to bind the two more closely together. Whereas Freud continually shifted the vicissitudes of affect to maintain the distinction between representation and affect, Green is interested in occasions when the two cannot be distinguished. In particular, he is interested in the intertwining of the two. This intertwining is succinctly captured in his aphorism ‘affect is the flesh of the signifier and the signifier of the flesh’ – a difficult phrase that needs unpacking.51 In the first instance, the phrase is Green’s counter to the famous adage of early Lacan that the unconscious is structured like a language. Green invokes Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the flesh as a way of pulling to the fore the corporeal aspect of affect and psychic life. According to this formulation, what underpins and makes representation possible is prepersonal affective corporeal life; in turn, affect refers back to that corporeal substrata of meaning. If affect is at the very heart of representation, then how can the minimalist desire to remove this heart be understood? Clearly this is an impossible desire, and the evidence for its impossibility is in the critical response to minimalism itself. When presented with a minimalist object, irrespective of how its tone and intention are diagnosed, beholders nonetheless have an affective response. Affect haunts art practice either as a legacy of our expectations about art or, as Green suggests, because it is a constant and constitutive ingredient of all representation. Or, to return to one of Freud’s earliest pronouncements on the ubiquity of affect, we can conclude: ‘Every event, every psychical impression is provided with a certain quota of affect of which the ego divests itself either by means of a motor reaction or by associative psychical activity.’52 Green’s work helps us to better understand the persistence of affect, however the variability of affective responses and the various mechanisms of divestment still need to be addressed. It is the vicissitudes of affect that can account for the peculiarly divergent responses to minimalism that I have catalogued. These divergences also recall the central problem of the transferential relationship to the work of art, namely: how do we know if the affect the subject feels corresponds with that of the object? Or, to phrase this in terms of aesthetic questioning about the location of feeling: is the affect an attribute of the art object or simply the response of the viewing subject? In the case of minimalism there is a consensus that the works withdraw from traditional ideas about aesthetic vitality, but the range of feelings this idea elicits makes this question of location and correspondence difficult to answer. Each response appears to construct its own affective object to embrace or react

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against. Indeed, it is only when the responses are viewed in relation to one another that the vicissitudes of affect can be detected. The most straightforward affective response to this withdrawal of vital signs is boredom. Rather than finding new pleasures, or even being annoyed at the loss of old ones, this response judges the radical reduction of interest to be simply boring. When boredom is transformed into a positive value, however, one of the key transformations or vicissitudes of affect is evident. Finding pleasure in the unpleasurable, or interest in the uninteresting, is a classic case of reversal into the opposite. Or, as Silvan Tomkins might observe, a personality type oriented towards maximizing positive affect would routinely deploy this defence against negative affect.53 When withdrawal is experienced as a rejection or denial of the viewer, a different defence is set in play. This perceived rejection causes anger, which is projected onto the objects – they are aggressive. In short, a primitive defence of externalization is marshalled against uncomfortable feelings. In these three responses we can clearly see how the affective encounter with art conforms to André Green’s understanding of the affective process as ‘the anticipation of a meeting between the subject’s body and another body (imaginary or present)’.54 The minimalist objects are anthropomorphized and, as it were, expected to be ‘responsive’ to the viewer. Some viewers can still squeeze a positive response from a largely unresponsive object, but most react against what becomes, in this process, an obdurate, taciturn or unaccommodating visage. This leaves two further responses: the recognition of blankness without further psychic elaboration or reaction, and the shift of interpretative weight towards the embodied experience of the work, which we find in the phenomenological readings of minimalism where the emphasis falls on the interimplication of perception and motility. These two responses can be understood as reactions to the suppression of affect and, in fact, as two stages of the same response. Joyce McDougall succinctly summarizes how blankness is linked to somaticization. She states: ‘Affect that receives no psychic elaboration, or compensation for its suppression, leaving in its wake nothing but a mental blank, runs the risk of continuing as a purely somatic event.’55 McDougall’s description of a mental blank perfectly tallies with Barbara Rose’s response to minimalism. This state is the precondition for the somatic event described by phenomenological approaches to minimalism. Now, the phenomenological approach to minimalism might appear to escape the affective register altogether: the blank or cool tone is simply taken as

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a directive to concentrate on perception and motility. Certainly this approach most closely follows the intentions of the artists and their desire to investigate the thing itself, but this shift of interpretative weight towards the corporeal can be understood, following Joyce McDougall’s insights, as not simply a logical shift of emphasis but a psychically predetermined one. O’Doherty’s acerbic quip that ‘marvelous paralysis’ reduced critics to phenomenology conveys a psychological truth. Suppressed affect, registered through a feeling of blankness, directs attention to the somatic engagement with the work. Alternatively, if negative affect is the base note of minimalism, the cold rejective tone of the work can be suppressed, disavowed or perhaps discharged via a concentration on perception and motility. In light of these complex defences, minimalism may seem like a failed project. Its central aim, the desire for the thing itself unencumbered by feeling, like Kant’s thing-in-itself, can only be posited but never experienced. What the positing achieves, however, is a reflection on feeling: this idea about feeling, or its desired eradication, is in turn the subject of feeling. If this reflexivity robs affect of its easy spontaneity, its straightforward fit with the author’s intentions and its adhesive role between work and viewer, it nonetheless repays these losses with a new complexity. Indeed, in the breach of these conventions we become aware of the ‘accompanying’ role usually assigned to affect in aesthetic experience. André Green questions this secondary role. He asks: ‘what makes us so sure that the affect has this accompanying role?’ Why not think instead, he suggests, ‘that the profound nature of affect is to be a psychical event linked to a movement awaiting a form?’56 The active anticipatory role of affect is asserted by this provocative question: affect, as it were, seeks expression rather than being a response or accompaniment to ideational content. Minimalism, by denying affect the usual role of accompaniment, lets loose this active role; indeed, affect begins to actively construct a very diverse array of affective objects, the dizzying range of which could certainly be regarded as provoking a new kind of intoxicating feeling.

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3

Participation, Affect and the Body: Lygia Clark

In all that I do, there really is the necessity of the human body, so that it expresses itself or is revealed as in a first [primary] experience. Lygia Clark1

In this single sentence the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark perfectly encapsulates the aims of her participatory works from the late 1960s onwards. Her works of this period intend to provoke in the participant the kind of vivid bodily sensations or feelings that she calls ‘first experience’ and which Maurice MerleauPonty calls the ‘first word’ or ‘primordial perception’.2 When Merleau-Ponty discusses how such experiences are manifested in the aesthetic domain, he concentrates on works of art that eschew the scientific grid of perspective, seeking instead to get ‘beneath the imposed order of humanity’.3 His favoured example is the painter Paul Cézanne whose work captures both the emergence of things and the uncertainty at the heart of perception – what Merleau-Ponty describes as ‘the vibration of appearances which is the cradle of things’.4 In Clark’s work the body of the participant becomes the site of this aesthetic investigation. Instead of depicting this realm of bodily experience, the participant must feel it directly and, rather than the singular focus on visual appearances, all manner of sensory vibrations are explored: touch, smell, movement, sight and hearing. To achieve this ambitious aim of getting beneath the order of the ‘already familiar world’ Clark uses the affect of startle or surprise to clear the way for renewed or refreshed attention.5 This aspect of her oeuvre will be analysed 47

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using the ideas of the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins whose account of the nine affects hard-wired into human biology includes a discussion of the role of startle in promoting intense concentration. His idea of the joy of communion will also be used to think about the mode of address of such works. The extreme intimacy of Clark’s works that use the participant’s body as an instrument of expression brings to the fore the ambiguity of feeling, a term that encompasses both bodily sensations and emotions. The imbrication of the senses with affective states, which Clark’s participatory works produce, is best explained by psychoanalysts working in the Kleinian and object-relations traditions, such as Donald Winnicott, who accentuates the importance of vitality, a term he uses to encompass feelings and sensations, and Daniel Stern, who developed the idea of vitality affects. Stern’s discussion of the amodal apperception that precedes the separation of the senses has close affinities with Merleau-Ponty’s idea of primordial perception. These three theorists will be deployed to explain one of Clark’s central therapeutic aims: to combat modern alienation through the revitalization of the body and feeling. This chapter, unlike the following three, traces the entire span of Clark’s career. The focus is on the development of Clark’s idea of creative expression as a kind of body-to-body communion or dialogue, an idea that is most vividly demonstrated by following its various permutations. Unlikely as it may seem, this aim is initially pursued through rethinking the language of geometric abstraction. In the first section of the chapter I examine how Clark, along with other participants in the Brazilian Neo-concrete movement, posited the abstract work of art as a ‘quasi-body’. The second section considers her groundbreaking participatory works, where the actual body of the beholder is required to produce the work of art. Unlike much body art of the 1960s and 1970s, which also used the body as a medium of expression (most often the artist’s body), these interactive works are usually deeply private, involving just the participant and the object or objects with which they interact. The illusory vitality of some of these objects further develops the idea of aesthetic experience as a body-to-body encounter. The third section of the chapter examines the further involvement or envelopment of the body by various kinds of clothes or stimulating skins, as well as the group activities devised by Clark that connected participants to each other to form what she called ‘the collective body’.6 Clark’s final works are extremely difficult to analyse within an art-historical context. They employ many of her previous materials, objects and interactions, however they

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are explicitly therapeutic and are situated in a clinical context. Her practice at this time is best described as a variety of psychoanalytically-informed body therapy. In retrospect, one might argue that Clark’s work as a whole was always already psychoanalytically oriented, whether intuitively or through specific influences – later in her career she certainly read and cited psychoanalytic thinkers. While the literature on Clark’s work is growing, this crucial aspect of her work is only beginning to be examined.7 In this chapter I pay particular attention to her specific philosophical and psychoanalytic influences, as well as employing other psychoanalytic concepts that further illuminate the affective dimension of her work.

1 q u a s i - b o d i e s: f r o m g e o m e t r i c a b s t r a c t i o n to m ove a b l e b e a s t s We do not conceive of a work of art as a ‘machine’ or as an ‘object’ but as a ‘quasi-corpus’ (quasi-body) ... which can only be understood phenomenologically.8

This declaration appeared in the Rio de Janeiro newspaper Jornal do Brasil on 22 March 1959. It is a small fragment from the ‘Neo-concretist manifesto’, a statement of principles written by the poet and critic Ferreira Gullar and signed by him and a group of artists whose inaugural exhibition opened the same day at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. Yve-Alain Bois has argued that the manifesto primarily represents the views of Lygia Clark, who was one of the seven signatories.9 Certainly the statement I have excerpted here seems to perfectly represent the future trajectory of Clark’s practice; indeed, it seems astonishingly prescient rather than descriptive: her work, as we will see, comes to embody it. The manifesto was intended to signal the group’s break with the history of abstraction. The opening paragraph reads as follows: The term ‘Neo-concretism’ marks a position taken relative to nonfigurative, ‘geometric’ art (Neoplasticism, Constructivism, Suprematism, the School of Ulm) and above all relative to art concret, which has succumbed to a dangerous hypertrophy of rationalism. Working as painters, sculptors, printmakers, and writers, the artists joined in the inaugural Neo-concretist exhibition have been led, through their personal experience, to reevaluate the theoretical positions adopted by art concret up to

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now – in the sense that none of these allow for a satisfying response to the expressive possibilities onto which our experiences open.10

Citing Susanne Langer, whose book Feeling and Form was first published in 1953, the signatories of the manifesto refer to the equivalent for the work of art as to be found in ‘living organisms’.11 They criticize concrete works for being merely an instrument for the eye, ‘not as a human way of grasping the world and of giving oneself to it’.12 Such works, they say, merely address themselves to ‘the eye-machine and not to the eye-body’.13 So how is the abstract work of art rendered like a living organism? The emergence of this idea can be traced by turning to the writings of Lygia Clark. Clark recalls that around 1956 she became interested in what she called an ‘organic’ line.14 For Clark, an organic line is real, not drawn. In her paintings of this period, such as the series Breaking the Frame and Modulated Surface, an organic line is produced by bringing together planes of wood, or wood and canvas; the planes create the line rather than the artist drawing it. The line, as it were, has a life of its own, which then operates as a liminal space, a hinge that joins and separates two planes. In a sense, Clark’s whole practice inhabits this hinge space created by the interaction of two or more entities. Expression and experience will be what occurs in this interaction, this contact between living or lively surfaces. In July 1959 in Jornal do Brasil Clark emphasizes the temporal aspect of this hinge space, calling the duration opened up ‘line-time’.15 Clark indicates that she began to deploy this idea in her Modulated Space series. These works have what she called an ‘external-line’: white lines edging, and sometimes penetrating, completely black surfaces. The edging lines waver between belonging to the picture plane and dissolving into the real space. In other words, the line flips between being inside and outside the picture plane; in this oscillating movement time breaks open the stasis of the image. In Unidades (Units) (1958), shown here in an installation shot from the inaugural Neo-concretist exhibition, the line transmutes again, becoming a ‘light line’ that distorts the squares (Fig. 1).16 Clark describes the action of this distortion as something that emerges automatically once the outer line penetrates inner space. It creates, she says, an oblique tension; the rectangles start to seem as if they are pushing into our space.17 She concludes that the pictorial space becomes revealed as a moment of the surrounding space. The idea of the object or painting including the surrounding space anticipates the concerns of minimalism. The minimalist artist Robert Morris described this

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aim eight years later in 1966 in the following way: ‘the better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of vision. The object is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic.’18 Later, when reflecting on her starting point in geometric abstraction, Clark spoke of a desire for a kind of immersion in the work: ‘I began with geometry, but I was looking for an organic space where one could enter the painting.’19 Clark’s desire to create a space where beholder and painting meet was articulated in broader and perhaps more familiar terms as early as 1956: ‘I firmly believe in the search for the fusion between “art and life.” ’20 In this aim, of course, she is revivifying the project that Peter Bürger identifies with

1 Lygia Clark at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with her works Unidades (Units), 1958 industrial paint on wood, 30 x 30 cm each Photographer: unknown

Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural Association

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the historical avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s and exactly consonant with other neo-avant-garde practices of the 1960s such as Fluxus, arte povera, land art, etc.21 These early concerns with participation and real space and time anticipate the concerns of minimalism and also prefigure the central concerns of Clark’s practice.22 From this brief prehistory of Clark’s interests leading up to the ‘Neoconcretist manifesto’ it would indeed seem that the manifesto represents her views about the way in which liveliness can be introduced into the work of art. Bois is quite adamant that the manifesto represents Clark’s ideas. He met Clark in 1968 and knew her personally, as did many of her key critics, including Guy Brett, Mario Pedrosa and Suely Rolnik. Bois argues that the manifesto ‘was entirely based on Lygia’s reinterpretation of the tradition of geometric abstraction through the lens of the phenomenology of perception, quoting Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical work, which she had recently discovered and which would remain a lifelong interest’.23 Her engagement with the history of abstraction can certainly be seen in the titles of her works, such as Contra-Relevos (Counter Reliefs) (1959), which pays homage to Vladimir Tatlin. Her further development of the relief form – the metal Casulos (Cocoons) of 1959 – begins to use geometric abstraction to represent an organic form. These wall-mounted works have an interior space formed by folding or interleaving metal sheets. They suggest another parallel with minimalism: the Cocoons are ‘specific objects’ before the fact.24 ‘Specific objects’ is a term Donald Judd first used in 1965 for works that are neither painting nor sculpture. In Brazil, as early as 1959, a term had already been coined for this convergence of painting and sculpture; Ferreira Gullar called such works ‘não-objeto’: no-objects or non-objects.25 It is interesting to note that Clark disagreed with this term, which to her mind confused genres. In her account of such works she returned to the terms of the manifesto, indicating that what was important for her was that the surface should be an organic body, like a living entity, as well as the reconceptualization of expression. She wrote: ‘the new expressive sense that our time proposes ... is a new concept of the beautiful: that of the living thing.’26 Conceptualizing art as a living thing, and expression as what occurs between it and the participant/beholder, opens the way for expression to be variously figured as dialogue, contact or mutual communion. Here we see a dramatic departure from the usual understanding of expression in art history: rather than art being an expression of the artist’s thoughts and feelings, it is what occurs between work and participant. Clark’s art occurs in this zone of contact.

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The following year, 1960, Clark abandoned the wall altogether and began her series Bichos (Beasts), commonly seen as a decisive shift in her career.27 This series of works is multifaceted articulated forms created by using hinges to join together metal plates (Fig. 2). The beasts are not static optical works – they must be handled. In fact, they require our participation. Clark stresses, however, that they are not simply passive objects that we can totally control but have their own logic and limits: ‘Its parts are functionally related, like those of a true organism, and the movement of these parts is interdependent.’28 We must initiate movement, but our action is caught in the reaction of the Beast. In other words, action and reaction are inseparable, making the outcome of any gesture unpredictable or, as Clark puts it, ‘your gesture with the immediate response by the Bicho creates a new relationship’.29 Both participant and beast are thus active. For example, if one does not work with the logic of the beast’s interlocking parts, it will refuse to hold the inappropriate shape; indeed, more than this, it will very noisily collapse in a heap, underscoring the participant’s failure to enter into a satisfactory relationship with it. In these works the desire for an art that is like an organism is realized.

2 Lygia Clark, Bicho (Beast), 1960 aluminium, 50 x 42 x 33 cm Photographer: unknown Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural Association

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The work, then, is not just a quasi-body; our interaction with it takes on the form of what Clark calls a ‘body-to-body relationship’.30 It is interesting to compare the minimalist artist Donald Judd’s review of the exhibition of these works at Alexander Gallery in New York in 1963 with David Medalla’s recollection of his first encounter with them. While Judd notes the reworking of the language of geometric abstraction, Medalla’s chance encounter brought to the fore the organic qualities of the beasts. Judd’s review, in Arts Magazine, is a very brief, terse account. He writes: ‘This sheet-metal sculpture is made of hinged segments and rectangles which adjust to various positions. The idea is clever. The style is ordinary capable constructivism.’31 Medalla, a Filipino artist, recalls unpacking Clark’s works for a show at Signals Gallery in London in 1964. He reports: When removing one of her sculptures from the Bedford van, one end which I was holding accidentally slipped from my grasp. To my astonishment, the sculpture, instead of falling completely to the ground as I had expected, began to unfold itself in the air. The sculpture unfolded itself swiftly until, almost by magic, from a flat two-dimensional piece it transformed itself into a spatial construction shaped like an abstract bird.32

Both Judd and Medalla interpret Clark’s work through the prism of their own concerns. Medalla, a kinetic artist, describes the independent movement of the beast after he accidentally propelled it into flight. He would later use the term ‘participatory propulsions’ to describe both Clark’s and his own work, but the sense of force and speed suggested by the term propulsion, while highly pertinent to the flight Medalla induced here, is slightly foreign to the gentler rhythm and tempo of Clark’s works.33 In Judd’s account, movement almost disappears and the position of the sculpture in space is emphasized. By using the term ‘position’, he stresses the moment following rearrangement, not the act of rearrangement. The beast’s flexibility is thereby rendered as a kind of serial proposition: one position after another, to rework his expression ‘one thing after another’.34 The focus on changed positions in space tends to occlude the dialogue between participant and beast, just as Medalla’s propulsion privileges the pyrotechnics of movement over the precise instant when gesture and reaction allow a new relationship to emerge. It could be argued that the two artist-reviewers are not so much looking at the wrong thing – fluttering bird or constructivist sculpture – but

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rather that they are looking at the wrong time. It is instructive to tease out the different temporal emphases here to understand what Clark meant by incorporating life into art. Surprisingly, perhaps, Judd’s emphasis on the instant rather than Medalla’s emphasis on movement is the salient comparison to make. We could say that Judd was right to focus on the instant, simply that he picks the wrong instant – the snapshot after the act, the dead instant where nothing happens, where the act has already died away into the past – whereas the instant that interests Clark is the live instance, the instant linked to the act. Clark had not yet read Gaston Bachelard when she made this work, but once she had, his account of the instant would allow her to more precisely figure how she wanted to suffuse art with life or life with art. Writing several years later, she describes how she wanted to underscore the instant – ‘the present-now of the act’ – which she argued was the only living reality in us.35 Bachelard’s work, which she is paraphrasing here, opposed Henri Bergson’s idea that time is experienced as continuous duration and only artificially divided up by science. For Bachelard, it is duration that we have to construct and reconstruct, whereas the instant is the lived experience of time. 36 Lived time, then, is not correlated with the flow of time but with the more sharply focused instants in which something happens. To grasp this elusive instant, Clark temporarily left object making behind and began her ‘propositions’, a term she would hereafter use frequently to refer to her work. Starting with Caminhando (Trailings) in 1963, her work increasingly requires not just the interaction of the participant but also the support of the participant’s body. If the Beasts could be mistaken for constructivist sculptures, her later works increasingly depart from any established visual vocabulary.

2

t h e e c l i p s e o f t h e a r t i s t: p a r t i c i p a t i o n

For Clark, Trailings represented the dissolution of artist and work.37 If we wanted to translate Clark’s practice into the language of conceptual art, this dissolution could be understood as akin to the dematerialization of the work of art. Some of Clark’s concerns are certainly similar to the aims of conceptual art; for example, she wanted to question the autonomy of the work of art, its elite nature, and the focus on the artist’s experience or subjectivity. This questioning was intended, however, to underscore the new centrality of the participant and the meaning of their actions.

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In Trailings the participant is now solely responsible for constructing the act. Clark provides written instructions for the work’s realization: Make yourself a Trailing: you take the band of paper wrapped around a book, you cut it open, twist it, and you glue it back together so as to produce a möbius strip. Then take a pair of scissors, stick one point into the surface and cut continuously along the length of the strip ... When you have gone the circuit of the strip, it’s up to you whether you cut to the left or the right of the cut you’ve already made. This idea of choice is capital. The special meaning is in the act of doing it. The work is your act alone. To the extent that you cut the strip, it refines and redoubles itself into interlacings. At the end the path is so narrow that you can’t open it further. It’s the end of the trail.38

Significantly, this proposition uses the möbius strip, a favourite form of the Swiss Concrete artist Max Bill. Bill had a strong influence on Brazilian art from the early 1950s and, according to Maria Alice Milliet, his work contributed to the reception and influence of the constructivist tradition.39 If the möbius strip retains a link to geometric abstraction, it is nonetheless a form that confounds the usual understandings of space. Clark noted that it ‘breaks with our spatial habits: right/left; front/back’ and forces us to experience limitless time and continuous space.40 While Bill’s sculptures used precious materials, such as granite and bronze, Clark renders this form in the ordinary material of paper. One is led, through cutting the paper, to experience more directly these breaks with our spatial habits. If you follow the trail of the möbius strip by cutting along the outside lefthand part of the strip, at some point you will find yourself inside the loop and cutting the other side of the paper. Even though one might expect this to happen, it is still disorienting and jarring when it does. It is as if something has invisibly shifted and we find ourselves suddenly in another place. Such a change in position relative to the paper would normally be attributed to movement, either on our part or its, and despite the absence of real movement, the strange sensation of it nonetheless persists. The work is thus curiously animated, as if the paper magically twisted in our hands and we, just as curiously, seem to trail along with this virtual movement. Merleau-Ponty would call this strange kind of magnetized experience a demonstration of the ‘intertwining’ of the body and the world, a term he uses to underscore the fact, as he sees it, that we are more intimately connected to things than we know.41 Things, he says, have an inner equivalent in us; we contain a carnal formula of their presence, so that what we grasp in the

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outside world will affect our inner sense.42 Hence it follows that something which suddenly breaks with our spatial habits is not just seen as a strange spatial object but impacts on us bodily, causing an inner sense of disorientation. This intertwining of body and world, subject and object, is one of the lessons Clark takes from Merleau-Ponty. In the case of Trailings, the result of our cutting actions – the strange interlacing of separate circuits of paper – is like a residue or relic of the momentary intense imbrication with the work. One can feel, then, the calling forth of the strange capacities of bodies to imagine, to go with and into a task, to be, as it were, enmeshed with the object in the instant. The intense immersion in the instant is facilitated by the startle response provoked by the magical, virtual movement of the paper. According to Silvan Tomkins the hard-wired affective response of surprise or startle serves to reset perception – it clears away whatever feelings or perceptions may be in the psychic apparatus to enable full attention to be turned to the startling phenomena.43 When we are surprised, we involuntarily stop what we are doing; we are suspended between the old action and any further action. This momentary suspense cuts up the flow of time and thereby enables more intense focus on the action that follows. The renewed intensity of focus following surprise is an aspect of almost all of Clark’s works. Surprise cuts us off from familiar reality as it plunges us more deeply into her propositions. After Trailings Clark returned to object-making one last time with the construction of various works made of metal, such as the climbers, Trepantes (Grubs), as well as her soft rubber animals or grubs, Trepantes (Obra Mole) Grubs (Soft Work). The Brazilian critic Mario Pedrosa greeted the soft grubs with great enthusiasm: ‘At last a sculpture one can kick.’44 Suely Rolnik characterizes this phase of Clark’s work (in 1963–64) as ‘Neoconcretism revisited’, arguing that the works she made in this period were nonetheless haunted by the möbius strip of Trailings.45 Clark herself said that this ‘regression’ to object making anticipated her sensory experiments.46 The sensuality of the Grub’s elasticity heralded the next phase of her work, which she called Nostalgia do Corpo (Nostalgia of the Body). In this period (1966–69), sensuality, and in particular tactility, are key concerns. Clark’s friend and fellow artist Hélio Oiticia suggested that Nostalgia of the Body should be translated as Longing of the Body. The former title, he argues, suggests a melancholic relation.47 With this alternative phrasing, sensuality is put forth as something that the body wants, needs and desires, rather than calling up the kind of attachment to loss suggested by melancholia and

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nostalgia. Works in this series range from the sensorial books, the leaves of which are constructed of plastic envelopes filled with simple substances such as shells, pebbles, wire wool and water, to more motile works in which the animation of the object is more sustained and rhythm is crucial, such as Pedra e ar (Air and Stone) (1966) and Respire comigo (Breathe with Me) (1966). Like Trailings, works such as Air and Stone and Breathe with Me can be constructed anywhere. Air and Stone, for example, requires only a plastic bag and a suitable stone. The participant fills the bag with air, seals it, and then balances the stone in one corner of the bag, alternately squeezing the bag to make the stone rise, and then relaxing the pressure to allow the stone to be engulfed by the bag. The rhythm that results seems to charge the elements with a strange vitality. Clark said the up-and-down movement of Air and Stone made her think it was a living thing – that it seemed like a body – while the process reminded her of an extremely disturbing birth.48 The associations of such movement, however, are multiple as this simple action of squeezing the bag can be figured in so many ways – in and out, up and down, pressure and release, engulfment and emergence – depending on where your attention drifts or focuses. These movements, in turn, call up the basic rhythms of the body: autonomic functions such as breathing and peristalsis and voluntary actions such as sucking, defecating and sexual activity. There is a degree of precariousness built into this action, with the stone only balanced on the bag; part of the participant’s role is to care for the stone as well as regulate its rhythm. Air and Stone is strangely moving in both senses of the word. In other words, in it both feeling and movement are conjoined. This peculiar conjunction can be understood by considering Daniel Stern’s account of vitality affects. For Stern, vitality affects are non-categorical affects; they form the unnoticed background pattern of life.49 The elusive qualities of these feelings are best captured, he says, by dynamic, kinetic terms, such as surging, fading away, fleeting, explosive and decrescendo. Following Susanne Langer, he suggests vitality affects are forms of feelings intimately connected to the vital processes of life: breathing, sleeping, waking, etc.50 Clark’s work brings this affective background into the foreground and we discover an absorbing pleasure in rhythm. Indeed, as Freud noted in passing, thinking about rhythm may be the key to thinking about the qualitative aspect of pleasure.51 Clark’s work may also be informed by Bachelard’s notion of ‘rhythmanalysis’, the idea that vitality involves vibration and that all exchanges both physical and psychological involve rhythm.52 Refinding the

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rhythm of repose, Bachelard suggests, may be the key to psychic and physical health.53 Breathe with Me is another rhythmical work by Clark and is similarly simply constructed: a corrugated rubber tube made into a ring, which is held to the ear and manipulated like a bellows. This work issues an invitation to breathe with it, to regulate one’s breathing with the movement of the hands and the sound that results. This complex synchronization of diaphragm, lungs, hands and sound has the effect of fusing together the tube and one’s own breath. The boundary between inside and outside is disrupted as participants appear to be tuned into or listening to themselves, as if their lung is outside or, alternatively, as if the tube is a prosthetic extension of the body, an auxiliary lung in space. Breathe with Me has the peculiar liveliness or animation that Donald Winnicott identifies as a quality of transitional objects: that is, an illusory ‘kind of vitality or reality of its own’.54 The work is situated, then, in the liminal space of experience Winnicott calls the realm of transitional objects and transitional phenomena; that is, an intermediate zone between subjective experience and what is objectively perceived and where illusion is not challenged.55 That Clark intuitively located her work in this intermediate zone is verified by Yve-Alain Bois. He notes that when Clark later read Winnicott she had her intuitions confirmed.56 For Winnicott, art is always located in this intermediate zone. He kindly tells us ‘that no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality, and that relief from this strain is provided by an intermediate area of experience that is not challenged (arts, religion etc.)’57 Clark’s work addresses this same strain between inner and outer, but relief is provided not by leaving the opposition unchallenged – rather, she creates an intense and proximate mirroring between them. This mirroring is at once real and an illusion, but an illusion spun out of the peculiar proclivities of the body.

3

p a r t i c ip a t i o n, e nve l o p m e n t , t h e r a py

In the next phase of her work (1967–69), which she named A casa é o corpo (The House is the Body) after her installation for the 1968 Venice Biennale, Clark’s objects encase the body, either wholly enveloping it or needing to be worn like clothing. On the one hand, the title points to the new zone of sensitization or enlivening – the housing as a second skin for provoking new experience – and,

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on the other, it underscores the intention of this cycle of work to make the participant find their home in the body, and to fully inhabit it. The new skin uses the body as a medium or resounding chamber for registering its presence and innovations. Certainly any residual sense of the subject manipulating the quasi-body object gives way in these works to a much more pronounced sense of mutual interference. The Máscaras sensoriais (Sensorial Hoods) of 1967, for example, stimulate different senses – or ‘ “clusters” of sense impressions’ to use Guy Brett’s terms (Fig. 3).58 Hearing and sight are altered by earpieces and eyepieces incorporated into the brightly coloured hoods, while smell is stimulated by various substances in the nosepieces, such as herbs or seeds. Smells include camomile, lavender, cloves and rosemary, while sound is muffled by gourds and generated by rattles and the captured wind of seashells. Sight is obscured by coloured overpainting on plastic and loose woven fabric, and restricted by mirrors, slits and round eyepieces. Clark’s intention was to stimulate a rich inner experience by cutting the person off from the world. As she put it: ‘he loses contact with reality and finds within himself a whole range of fantastic experiences.’59 Brett describes the constellation of substances as often incongruous, thereby adding to the sense of a fantastic inner experience provoked by the new skin.60

3

Lygia Clark, Máscaras sensoriais (Sensorial Hoods), 1967

Photographer: unknown Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural Association

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Clark stated that the masks succeeded in capturing ‘the infrasensorial or the mental-sensorial’.61 In other words, an inner imagining and feeling is made possible along the lines of Goethe’s after-image; that is, these inner sensations, although provoked by the mediation of the second skin, seem more like peculiar artefacts of the body because they no longer correlate with something in the outer world. By this means, Clark wanted the participant to reach his or her self. In a letter to Hélio Oiticica she explained: ‘He, man, is now the “animal” [bicho] and the dialogue is now with himself according to his own “organicness” and also in the sense of the magic he can draw out of himself.’62 This magic is slightly disorienting. Without the reality test of the outside world, the participant – or ‘man-helmet’ as Clark calls him – has what she describes as ‘the tendency to disintegrate at the time of the experience’.63 Disintegration, she suggests, may be a necessary element of a new maturing. This description of the action of the hood can be illuminated by another idea drawn from Winnicott. For Winnicott, however, the key term is not ‘disintegration’ but ‘unintegration’. He argues that unintegration is a feature of all adult life; every human being, he says, has an innate capacity ‘to become unintegrated, depersonalized, and to feel that the world is unreal’.64 He goes even further in his praise for adult unintegration: it is what allows intensity of feeling. He states: ‘Through artistic expression we can hope to keep in touch with our primitive selves whence the most intense feelings and even fearfully acute sensations derive, and we are poor indeed if we are only sane’.65 Winnicott’s description of a regressive dimension of art perfectly matches Clark’s aims. Her propositions explicitly stimulate the sensory and affective recollections of the preverbal body. This inner dialogue with the corporeal past is in the service of recapturing vitality, as it is in Winnicott’s therapeutic method. Another work in this series, O eu e o tu (The I and the You), complicates this inner dialogue by adding another person (Fig. 4). A man and a woman encased in separate hooded boiler suits are joined together by a tube, positioned like an umbilical cord. Blinded and bound together, the participants are restrained and restricted, yet simultaneously licensed to make intimate contact with each other’s bodies.66 In the lining of each suit are textured substances suggestive of the surfaces of the body: in the woman’s suit the textures are masculine, in the man’s suit the textures are feminine. To explore these textures the participant must first undo the zips that give access to the lining, thus a kind of mutual undressing followed by caressing is implied. Each participant is then simultaneously touching and touched by the other,

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4

Lygia Clark, O eu e o tu (The I and the You), 1967

Photographer: unknown Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural Association

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feeling and felt, active and passive, subject and object. Through the gradual process of finding and exploring the other’s cavities, each participant finds in the other its own sexed features. This conjoined caress puts the I in the You, the You in the I. Finding one’s features outside, while the other finds theirs inside you, fulfils the kind of reversible mutuality Merleau-Ponty describes: ‘It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine his.’67 It is not fused horizons that emerge here, but rather the intertwining of one in another. Silvan Tomkins describes the affective dimension of this form of mutuality as ‘claustral joy’.68 The pleasures of binding and bonding are well captured in this phrase as they are in Clark’s work. However, alongside the positive affects associated with joyful play, mutuality and dialogic engagement is the possibility of a more fearful response to the kinds of mutual exploration encouraged here. What might be called the dangers of intimacy (vulnerability, intrusion, loss of freedom) are also evoked by the severe restriction of the suits. Both possibilities are indicated by Clark’s description of these works: ‘I use clothing only to denude the body.’69 Paradoxically, addition facilitates a kind of subtraction. The body’s bare being is experienced through clothing. The enigmatic nature of the body is uncovered through a double. The next phase of work (1968–79), O corpo é a casa (The Body is the House), announces a reversal of the terms of the previous cycle. These works and the following series A fantasmática do corpo (Phantasmagoria of the Body) are collective actions. If in the previous series The House is the Body the self was both subject and object of the action, in these works the body is connected to others in a common body or a community experience. The body turns outwards towards others and the world. It becomes a vital building block, what Clark describes as ‘the living structure of cellular architecture, the mesh of an infinite tissue’.70 The participant becomes what Merleau-Ponty calls a ‘fold’ in the ‘flesh of the world’; that is, the body is continuous with the world – part of its tissue – and yet individuated, a cell or fold within it.71 This model of the relationship between bodies and world emphasizes reciprocity and interdependence, rather than the customary sovereignty of the self over the world or others. In these group works the object now virtually disappears. As Clark notes: ‘what remains of the object (some elastic bands, plastic sheets, jute sacks and thread) are quite empty of meaning and can only be brought to life by human support.’72 The further reduction of artistic means serves to intensify the importance of human action and interaction. Works, or forms of architecture,

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are now literally constructed from bodies and these meagre materials. For example, Arquiteturas biológicas: Nascimento (Biological Architecture Birth) (1969) requires six people to build a human tunnel. Two people put their legs into net bags sewn into the ends of a rectangular plastic sheet and then lie on their backs with their legs in the air. Four people then function as organic buttresses, two at each end, offering a shoulder each to hold up the legs and thus creating what Clark calls ‘poetic shelter in which inhabiting is equivalent to communicating’.73 That is, bodily gestures both construct the environment and serve as a kind of communication: ‘legs apart’ is at once a structure and an invitation, a tunnel and a passageway for someone else to pass through. An environment is elaborated from bodies in contact, in touch with one another. The next series, Phantasmagoria of the Body, was developed when Clark worked with a group of students at the Sorbonne. In 1972 she was invited to teach a course on gestural communication. Combining the group actions of the previous suite of works with the regressive mode of some of the earlier

5

Lygia Clark, Baba antropofágica (Cannibalistic Slobber), 1973

Photographer: unknown Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural Association

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works, this series returns to the enigmatic nature of the body: its capacity to generate or embrace illusions. Two works are particularly suggestive of the strange imaginings of the body, Canibalismo (Cannibalism) and Baba antropofágica (Cannibalistic Slobber) (both 1973) (Fig. 5). In each group action, one participant lies on the ground surrounded by the group. In Cannibalism the blindfolded students take and eat food from a pouch located over the belly of the reclining student. In Cannibalistic Slobber the action is reversed: thread is drawn from a cotton reel in the mouth of each of the participants and placed on the body of the reclining student. If the action of Cannibalism generates a fantasy of eating the other, then the reversed action of Cannibalistic Slobber is something like giving one’s inner substance to the other and, indeed, this is precisely what Clark reports. The participants felt as if they were taking out their own insides. These fantasies of the body take Clark’s practice into more dangerous territory and in a diary entry from 1973 she refers to a series of ‘counter-transfers’ that depressed her.74 Her counter-transferences are not described in any detail, however she reports that one student referred to Cannibalistic Slobber as showing him how women ensnare men in their spiders’ webs – his transferential response to the situation, no doubt. His perception, transferential or otherwise, seemed absolutely right to Clark. She describes her response in the strange mode of knowing and unknowing that Christopher Bollas calls the ‘unthought known’: she felt she already knew that she was the cannibalistic spider catching people up in her propositions, but the clear formulation of it came as a shock.75 This pair of works perhaps follows too closely the typical oral phantasies of infancy described by Melanie Klein, such as devouring the other, eating the contents of the mother’s stomach, or taking out the mother’s insides. The repetition of typical aggressive infant phantasies would make transferential reactions more likely than in any other works.76 In sum, this pair intersects with typical phantasies rather than promulgating a recovery of the wild imaginings, feelings and sensations of a pre-individual body. While the reference to cannibalism in art production has a particular history in Brazil – it served as a metaphor for early twentieth-century Brazilian responses to modernism – significantly in these works cannibalism is figured as a mutual or reversible relation.77 Clark’s final series of works (if we can still call them that), Estructuração do Self (The Structuring of the Self ) (1976–82), move wholly into the therapeutic context, addressing severe psychotic fantasies about the body. As early

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as 1971, when contemplating a shift in this direction, Clark argued that such work would continue the trajectory of The Body is the House, and move her practice into the world.78 In this last phase of her work many of the familiar textural substances she used in her art practice – nets, hoses and bags – are redeployed to augment the damaged body-image of the patient. In light of these last works, we can see that Clark’s work always had a therapeutic function; the aim of art, she said in the early 1960s, is to combat depersonalization and to offer modern man ‘the chance to find himself ’.79 The self one finds in these works is not the modern rationalist subject, the ‘eye-machine’ that was the point of departure in the ‘Neo-concretist manifesto’. Rather, it is a precarious subject: a subject whose enigmatic body is at once its own and yet inhabited by wild imaginings; a subject who grasps but is also grasped by the world, thus active, open and vulnerable at one and the same time; and a subject deeply dependent on the bodies of others. If, as Thierry de Duve argues, one of the tasks of contemporary art ‘is to construct models of the contemporary subject’, then Clark gives us a model of the subject proper to our own time.80

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4

Eva Hesse’s Late Sculptures: Elusive Expression and Unconscious Affect

I saw her as a very interior person making psychic models. Robert Smithson1

If expressiveness is radically rejected by minimalism, then how are we to understand the work of Eva Hesse, an artist who is at once a liminal figure in the debate about minimalism, and whose work is both moving and expressive? This exact issue, the return of expression in a virulently anti-expressive context, is tackled by Rosalind Krauss in a short catalogue essay on Hesse originally published in 1979 and titled ‘Eva Hesse: Contingent’. Of all the essays that have explored Hesse’s relationship to minimalism, and by now there are quite a number of them, Krauss’ brief essay still seems to best capture both the necessity and the anomaly of aligning Hesse’s work with minimalism. According to Krauss, Hesse’s art is clearly indebted to minimalism, yet her expressiveness is a profound and shocking departure from minimalist tenets. Such is the effect of Hesse’s work, however, that Krauss shifts her previously articulated stance on expression. In her essay of 1973, ‘Sense and sensibility: reflections on post 60s sculpture’, discussed in chapter one, expression is essentially a model of art production that is being debunked: it is an outdated model that her account suggests is premised upon an illusion. Krauss argues that expression and intention are the temporal equivalent of spatial illusion in painting, and that the antiillusionism of the 1960s confronts both the spatial and temporal aspects of traditional art making. In other words, by championing literalness and the 67

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real space and time of the work, the art of the 1960s dispels both spatial illusion and the temporal illusion of intention. The debunking of expression is not continued in her analysis of Hesse. What is sustained, however, is her idea that expression in art is essentially private. In ‘Sense and sensibility’ Krauss argues that the art of the 1960s opposed the traditional model of meaning that emphasizes interiority and ‘the separateness of experience’.2 For Krauss, expression is about the ‘separateness of experience’. Krauss establishes this way of thinking about expression through a series of analogies. First, she aligns expression with the artist’s intention, and then, on the basis that intention is ‘necessarily private’, just like senseimpressions, it is assumed to be something radically subjective, unverifiable and incommunicable.3 By equating expression with intention, and intention with sense-impressions, it is shorn of its usual etymological meaning of something inner being ‘pressed out’ and is instead profoundly interiorized. It is then presumed to be an unknown and unknowable personal dimension of art. In her essay on Hesse, Krauss suggestively reframes the privacy of expression as what is ‘beyond, or beneath, speech’.4 This formulation of expression chimes with Joan Copjec’s suggestion that to attend to the unconscious in cultural production we need to learn to read the ‘inarticulable’.5 Copjec’s particular concern is with repressed desire. Her approach, however, has a more general application for thinking about how the unconscious might be at work in the visual arts. For my purposes, what is especially interesting is her insistence that we attend to what cannot easily be put into words, rather than resiling from the challenge of interpreting these less familiar aspects of works of art. Attending to the inarticulable, I would suggest, is a fruitful departure point for thinking about the expressive power of Hesse’s work, the main theme of this chapter. I will not be investigating Hesse’s link with minimalism, or the ways in which her work departs from a minimalist sensibility or minimalist tenets – these issues have been well canvassed by Krauss, Anna Chave and Briony Fer, among others.6 Indeed, I think we can now take it as read that the link between Hesse’s work and minimalism is established, just as the challenges her work poses to minimalism have been well articulated. What remains to be explored are the effects of this thinking about Hesse on the interpretation of minimalism. For example, Briony Fer’s subtle handling of the relationship between Hesse and minimalism notes how her work makes us rethink the opposition rationalism/irrationalism. She argues that the ‘underlying irrationalism in minimalism’ comes into view courtesy of the challenge to this opposition.7 This unpicking of the received wisdom

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about minimalism is very much in tune with my overall aim. However, in this chapter my interest is in understanding the precise nature of Hesse’s expression and how the affective tone of her work can be understood. With this aim in mind, I investigate some of her late sculptures that are expressive, but whose affective tone is not easily characterized. Hesse’s work, as we will see, complicates the idea of a coherent affective or expressive tone.

1

c o n t r a d i c to r y f e e li n g s a n d t h e p a r t- o b j e c t

The work of Eva Hesse has garnered so much close and careful attention over the years by such insightful critics that it would seem unlikely that there is much more to say about it. Surprisingly, my chief concern – the affective dimension of Hesse’s work – has escaped close examination. This aspect of her work has certainly been noted over the years, but not examined in any detail.8 For example, Lucy Lippard, one of the first and still one of the finest Hesse critics, begins her discussion of the critical issues raised by Hesse’s works by drawing attention to the strange and contradictory emotions they elicit: It is a curious characteristic of many of Hesse’s works that once you have been touched by them you are caught between emotions. That they can be simultaneously experienced as humorous, impressive, whimsical, pathetic, calm, frantic, grand, or sad is a measure in some contradictory manner of the seriousness that lies at the core of her art.9

Lippard’s insight is echoed by innumerable later critics who have also investigated the many contradictions at the heart of Hesse’s practice: that her work calls up a kind of bodily affect but is not of the body; it is anthropomorphic but also resolutely abstract, even bordering on blank as Briony Fer argues; it is expressive but not an outpouring of feeling, to reiterate the key point or ‘paradox’ of her work that Krauss identifies.10 Even the mode of address to the viewer or audience involves contradictions. Anne Wagner shows how many of Hesse’s sculptures make contradictory ‘overtures’ to the viewer: soliciting them and yet also refusing them access.11 Hesse’s work seems to impel a desire to make lists of various contradictory or contrary terms. Wagner’s list includes ‘frailty and strength, chaos and order, flesh and latex, absence and presence’.12 Lippard, in reference to Hesse’s first solo sculptural exhibition, refers to ‘a forthright confrontation of incongruous physical and formal attributes: hardness/softness, roughness/

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6 Eva Hesse, Ringaround Arosie, 1965 varnish, graphite, ink, enamel, cloth-covered wire, papier-caché, unknown modelling compound, Masonite, wood, 26 1/2 x 16 3/4 x 4 1/2 inches (67.5 x 42.5 x 11.4 cm) Museum of Modern Art, New York, fractional and promised gift of Kathy and Richard S. Fuld, Jr, 2005 © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photograph: Abby Robinson, New York, and Barbora Gerny, Zurich

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smoothness, precision/chance, geometry/free form, toughness/vulnerability, “natural” surface/industrial construction’.13 Maurice Berger argues in relation to early works, such as Not Yet (1966) and Ringaround Arosie (1965), that ‘their meanings oscillate between unreconciled and contradictory polarities’ (Fig. 6). His list includes ‘male/female, soft/hard, seductive/repulsive, ordinary/strange’.14 In each of the lists above there is an interesting drift from describing physical and formal features of the work – hardness/softness, geometry/free form – to more associative personifications of the work: male/female, seductive/repulsive, toughness/vulnerability, frailty/strength. The transition from verifiable features to more metaphorical associations is not marked or noted in any way. It is as though the work induces such free association, even under the surveillant eye of critical interpretation. Something of the power of her work can also be seen in the way these associations once suggested seem to inhere in the works themselves. While many artists bring together contradictions, and the work of many artists generates associations, the extraordinary range and density of contradictory associations Hesse’s work calls up is quite exceptional. Such a proliferation, I want to suggest, is characteristic of the unconscious and, furthermore, the contradictory feelings that Hesse’s works evince indicate the operation of unconscious affect. I will return to the latter idea in greater detail in the final section of the chapter, which examines Ignacio Matte-Blanco’s contribution to the debates in psychoanalytic theory about unconscious affect. Suffice to say here that Matte-Blanco describes affect as sharing characteristics of the unconscious. Indeed, he goes further, questioning our capacity to separate one from the other. Both are part of what he calls the ‘indivisible mode’; that is, where the division or distinction between things is not adhered to, hence a mode in which contradictions can coexist peacefully, as it were, side by side.15 My concern with unconscious affect does not extend to investigating Hesse’s specific unconscious. This is another issue well dealt with by others, including Lucy Lippard and Anne Wagner. Lippard refers to the issue in passing but, as usual, with great insight. She notes that one of the legacies of surrealism is a certain indirect mode of representing the human figure (‘the composite figure-like, yet often abstract, form’), which can also symbolize the self by ‘ ‘‘unconsciously” tapping submerged elements within the artist’.16 Hesse’s works resemble these types of personnage in a very particular way. Lippard explains: ‘Hesse worked out from a body identification into a

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physical identification with the sculpture itself, as though creating a counterpart of herself and the absurdity of her life was a way to survive it.’17 This animation or liveliness of essentially abstract forms is indeed part of the suggestive power of Hesse’s works; that this liveliness is transduced from Hesse’s unconscious to the work is certainly a strong possibility. Anne Wagner’s interest in Hesse’s unconscious is much more detailed. Her essay is a very careful and insightful reworking of the psychobiographical approach. To summarize, Wagner negates the illustrative or literal tenor of much psychobiography and invents a new approach to the role of the artist’s life in art production where the unconscious figures. To consider how Hesse’s unconscious wishes, conflicts or desires inform her work, Wagner suggests that we are searching not only for what she did not control or know about her own work, but also for a particular type of imagery. To uncover the work of the unconscious, Wagner instructs: ‘We would be looking for the ways it repeatedly configured, around the edges of a legibly artistic protocol, an imagery that was the repository of desires, prohibitions and fears.’18 Wagner suggests that Hesse’s unconscious feelings for her mother can be understood as the principal stimulant for that imagery. Without doubt the traumatic events of Hesse’s life, such as her flight from Nazi Germany in 1938, initially without her parents, and her mother’s suicide in 1946, would have created unconscious faultlines that facilitated a certain kind of affectively charged work. Both Lippard and Wagner suggest very compelling ways of thinking about how this process might take place. My analysis, however, is concerned with how Hesse’s work resonates with the viewer’s unconscious. In other words, following the lead of minimalism, it is the entanglement of the work and the viewer’s affective response that forms the centre of this study. One last qualification or clarification about the unconscious is necessary. I am not investigating more formulated unconscious fantasies about Hesse’s works, such as might be represented by the part-object. Recently, the partobject has become the psychoanalytic concept most consistently applied to Hesse’s work. For example, it is the organizing concept of the recent exhibition Part Object, Part Sculpture, which included her work; it informs Mignon Nixon’s interpretation of Hesse’s oeuvre; and is endorsed by Briony Fer and Yve-Alain Bois – at least in relation to the artist’s earlier work in the case of Bois.19 The part-object is associated with the work of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein, although the term itself was first coined by one of her analysts, Karl

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Abraham. Klein uses the term to describe the infant’s very early phantasmatic relations to the breast, where love and hate are split and apportioned to what appears, or is imagined, alternatively as the good (gratifying) breast or the bad (frustrating) breast. Significantly, the part-object is described by R. D. Hinshelwood as ‘firstly an emotional object, having a function rather than a material existence’.20 Wilfred Bion explains that ‘the part-object-relationship is not with anatomical structures only but with function, not with anatomy but with physiology, not with the breast but with feeding, poisoning, living, hating’.21 Part-object relations or, more correctly, schizoid object relations, are supplemented by whole object relations when the child enters the depressive phase and can tolerate ambivalent feelings being elicited by the same object. Notably, the persecutory or paranoid-schizoid position, which precedes the depressive position, is not surmounted. As Juliet Mitchell notes, the two positions, the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive, ‘develop in the first months of life, but they always remain as part of our personality, of our normal and our psychotic development’.22 The importance of these positions, and the object relations that underpin them, is strongly emphasized by Klein. She states: ‘object relations are at the centre of emotional life.’23 In chapter one I noted that Michael Fried’s response to minimalism could be interpreted through the framework of projection and the paranoid-schizoid position. He describes his response to minimalism in persecutory terms: minimalist art is perceived as being aggressive towards him. Fried’s response perfectly captures the affective flavour of such an encounter. Interestingly, when the part-object is deliberately applied to Hesse’s work, there is no mention of the affective tenor of her art or the extreme or intense emotions usually associated with schizoid object relations. Instead, other features of the part-object are explored, such as its status as a part or fragment of the body and its indeterminate gender. This approach is pursued by Mignon Nixon. She points to the fragmentation of the body in works such as Ringaround Arosie, and the gender ambiguity of this fragment: the protruding central section of the work is argued to be suggestive of both penis and nipple. Indeed, in a letter to Sol LeWitt, Hesse refers to the work as both ‘breast and penis’.24 Drawing upon the prior work of Annette Michelson, Nixon develops Michelson’s interest in ‘art objects as part-objects’, which is glossed as an insistent trend in American art of the 1950s and 1960s towards representing the body in bits and pieces.25 Nixon applies the idea of the part-object to the work of both Hesse and Louise Bourgeois. That their work can be understood as part of a more general trend towards fragmented or attenuated

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representations of the body is undeniable. Michael Balint noted, as early as 1951, the greater capacity to tolerate fragmented images of the body on the part of modern audiences.26 In the case of Hesse, whether her attenuated and metaphorical modes of suggesting bodiliness can be best understood through the concept of the part-object is less clear. Yve-Alain Bois has recently argued that Hesse’s late works (after 1966), which are my concern here, cannot be assembled together by the idea of the part-object.27 He argues that repetition dissolves or replaces the part-object. Works from the part-object phase, he suggests, are characterized by an opposition between fixed and pendulous forms, as well as a ‘part-to-part mode’, a kind of pre-minimalist compositional format rather than the ‘negative power of mindless repetition’ that Bois sees at work in her later phase.28 The division Bois suggests here between ‘a part-to-part mode’ and ‘an additive mode’ is a very astute reading of Hesse’s oeuvre and its most substantial shift. Such a division may not, however, have the same level of categorical precision or pertinence for thinking about the affective tone of her work. Certainly if we take our cue from the feelings the works elicit, the part-object describes neither the response to the late works nor the earlier ones. Her work is in equal parts very suggestive and restrained, to add yet another contrary to the burgeoning list. It certainly does not speak of the kind of affective extremes one would expect the part-object to elicit, such as ravenous, all-devouring love or poisonous hate. One might think that the extremes described by Klein in some way approximate the polar opposites that are continually associated with Hesse’s oeuvre, however the partobject is precisely the psychic formation that refuses such ambiguity. The breast is either gratifying or persecutory, never both – splitting is the leitmotif here. To understand contradictory feelings we need to look elsewhere. It is interesting to note that the presence of contradictory feelings is a characteristic of the works that Hesse saw as her most successful – what she described as absurd, the earliest being Hang Up (1966) (Fig. 7). Of this work she said: ‘It was the first time my idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came through.’29 By extremity, Hesse means contradictory or polarized positions – extremities – rather than intensity of feeling. Earlier in the same interview she explains her thinking about the links between feeling, absurdity and contradictions. She begins by stating that her work and life have been absurd: There isn’t a thing in my life that has happened that hasn’t been extreme – personal health, family, economic situations ... And now back to extreme sickness – all extreme – all absurd ... absurdity is the key

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word ... It has to do with contradictions and oppositions. In the forms I use in my work the contradictions are certainly there. I was always aware that I should take order versus chaos, stringy versus mass, huge versus small, and I would try to find the most absurd opposites or extreme opposites ... I was always aware of their absurdity and also their formal contradictions and it was always more interesting than making something average, normal, right size, right proportion ... 30

In the case of Hang Up, Hesse describes the absurdity in ‘a part-to-part’ way, as though one thing does not lead to another so much as butt up or

7 Eva Hesse, Hang Up, 1966 acrylic on cloth over wood; acrylic on cord over steel tube, 72 x 84 x 78 inches (182.9 x 213.4 x 198.1 cm). Through prior gifts of Arthur Keating and Mr and Mrs Edward Morris, 1988.130, The Art Institute of Chicago © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth b/w: installation view at her studio 134 Bowery, New York 1966

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retroact against another. Thus the two main components of this work – the mummified frame and the whip-like metal hanger – gently jar each other, even as they are undeniably a resolved compositional whole. Hesse draws attention to such contrasts. She describes the treatment of the frame as almost over-working – it is wrapped up like a broken arm in a ‘hospital bandage’, rigid and neat, and finely painted in graduated shades of grey. It is, she says, ‘so absurd to have that long thin metal rod coming out of that structure.’ She continues: ‘[it] comes out a lot, about ten or eleven feet out, and what is it coming out of? It is coming out of this frame, something and yet nothing.’31 The way Hesse sets up this comparison makes one think that the rod, with its occupation of real space, draws attention to the ambiguity of the frame, its wavering status between something and nothing, emptiness and objecthood, three dimensions and two. Viewed in this manner, the contrasts or ‘seeming opposites’ identified by Bill Barrette as the key features of Hang Up – ‘painting and sculpture, real and depicted space, darkness and light, expansiveness and limitation’ – operate primarily between the two components. 32 In terms of affective tone, there is a withholding blankness set alongside a mild sense of threat as the projection of the metal rod, arrested in midair, suggests a kind of lassoing or catching up of the viewer. Most importantly, there is also a humorous quirkiness partly derived from the strange conjunction of parts. In thinking about the combination of unusual parts, Bois notes the pertinence of the hybrids of surrealism, so well expressed by the adage borrowed from Lautréamont, which redefines beauty as ‘the chance encounter of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table’.33 In her exploration of Hesse’s (and others’) link to surrealism, Lippard suggests that humour is founded on incongruity.34 However, why some absurd conjunctions are humorous but not others is difficult to explain. In Hang Up there is certainly a dark humour at play, as there is in the example from Lautréamont. I will return to the role of humour in thinking about the unconscious and the indivisible mode in the final section of this chapter. Hesse links the success of Hang Up to the absurdity of life. She concluded that Hang Up was ‘the most ridiculous structure that I ever made and that is why it is really good. It has a kind of depth I don’t always achieve and that is the kind of depth or soul or absurdity of life or meaning or feeling or intellect that I want to get.’35 The quality of absurdity Hesse sought in her work is another way to approach the conjunction of highly contradictory feelings that I want to investigate here. It is a testament to the power of her work that the

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‘additive works’, to use Bois’ term, are able to generate such feelings without the obvious contrasts deployed in Hang Up.

2

R e p e t i t i o n N i n e te e n I I I

Repetition Nineteen III is one of Hesse’s earliest fibreglass pieces made at Aegis Reinforced Plastics, the fabricator recommended to her by Robert Morris and Stylianos Gianakos (Fig. 8).36 The work was originally exhibited in her 1968 solo show, Chain Polymers, at Fischbach Gallery in New York, alongside other fibreglass works made by Aegis in the summer of 1968, such as Accretion and Accession III. The first handmade version of the work, Repetition Nineteen I, made the previous year from papier mache, has none of the peculiar vitality of this third version. The units of Repetition Nineteen I are half the height – ten inches as opposed to twenty – and the familiar scale of them, which recalls pots, tins or domestic containers, prevents the pecu-

8 Eva Hesse, Repetition Nineteen III, July 1968 fibreglass, polyester resin installation variable, 19 units Exhibition view at Fischbach Gallery, New York 1968 Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of Anita and Charles Blatt, 1969 © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

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liar anthropomorphism that lifts the third version into the strange affective register that interests me here. As the titles indicate, there was a second version of Repetition Nineteen, which, according to Lippard, was going to be made in metal, then latex, and then after being abandoned was resurrected as Hesse’s first piece made at Aegis.37 Lippard notes that the fabricator remembers the first attempt to make the work as a ‘horrible failure’: all of the fibreglass cylinders were identical. This failure, however, is also illuminating: the organic individuality, identified by Lippard as a key feature of this piece, would clearly have been missing. Lippard refers to Repetition Nineteen III as: ‘Like schoolchildren in uniform, or prisoners, or young trees in a nursery, they carry within them their exuberant individuality.’38 Lippard’s list of associations is curious, calling up, on the one hand, the gathering together of the cute and diminutive – saplings and schoolchildren – and yet, on the other, separating these two images with a more threatening image of constraint and conformity – prisoners, a group more likely to repel each other, as well as any observer. The work certainly seems to borrow a little from each of these extremes. There is something endearing about the group, their imperfections and unevenness have a battered, crumpled or dishevelled quality – or, to think of this more in terms of posture or distribution of weight, some are leaning or slouching. Certainly they depart from the imperative to sit-up-straight drilled into schoolchildren. Viewed as slouchers, the units have a quirky, mischievous quality, displaying the kind of disarray or departure from order that prompted Lippard to coin the term ‘eccentric abstraction’. Indeed, these later works fit under this rubric as well, if not better, than the pendulous organic forms of Several (1965) and Ingeminate (1965) that inspired the term, and which were in the 1966 exhibition Lippard curated with that name (Fig. 9 and 10).39 If the rounded, irregular quality of these earlier works suggests body parts, they are not identifiable or particular parts. Several might be from the interior of the body, intestines perhaps, though there is no sense of gore. The very strong resemblance to outsized sausages, and thus the suggestion of processing and containment, probably dims any association with raw or exposed guts. In turn, Ingeminate has been compared to both breasts and penises, although the likeness is very slight: scale, shape and texture are all wrong.40 The possibility of hanging the forms, which certainly encourages the idea of a hanging appendage, is the one dimension of resemblance that makes the comparison plausible. That said, the organic quality is undeniable and the suggestion of

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9 Eva Hesse, Several, 1965 acrylic, papier-caché, latex, rubber, 88 x 11 x 7 inches (223 x 28 x 18 cm), 4 units Glenstone © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photograph: Abby Robinson, New York

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10 Eva Hesse, Ingeminate, 1965 enamel, cord, papier-caché, latex, rubber, 188 x 4 1/2 inches (478 x 11.5 cm), installation variable Daros Collection, Switzerland 1994 © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photograph: Abby Robinson, New York

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a body part or fragment is similarly apt, although it must be emphasized, as many critics have argued, that the sense of the body is very attenuated. In comparison, the later works, such as Repetition Nineteen III, are more geometric and therefore one might think less organic. Yet they seem more like complete beings, despite the closer adherence to geometric form – hence Lippard’s idea of saplings and slouching schoolchildren. However, this uneven distribution of weight can also be read through a more dignified and venerable vocabulary – many of the units demonstrate a classical contrapposto stance. The battered quality sits alongside this deployment of an ancient form of elegant asymmetry. Examining the pleasant or endearing images of serial forms follows one pole of Lippard’s description, the pole identifying the units as exuberant individuals. To trace the other course, represented by the enforced conformity of prisoners, one notes that there is something very mildly repellent about the pieces. They are not repellent in the manner of disgust or repugnance; all of the feelings evoked by this work are attenuated or finessed. Rather, both individually and as a group, these works insist on our distance. They repel us by demanding space. However, the work’s recent position in the Museum of Modern Art in New York might suggest otherwise. Repetition Nineteen III was displayed in the Mimi and Peter Haas Gallery in front of a broken or freestanding wall. The wall created a gap of roughly two feet that, when viewed from the rear, conveyed the idea of a passageway. It was certainly wide enough to be considered a thoroughfare or narrow doorway. While I was looking at the work in this position in 2005, quite a few museum visitors approached the work from behind and ended up walking into the space of its display. Without exception, the visitors all looked more than a little bemused and embarrassed once they realized their inappropriate position. That they became aware of this inappropriateness, and realized it so quickly, points to the repelling capacity of the work. It was displayed on the floor, not raised off the ground on a platform – a strategy often used with floor works to position them on a separate plane to the spectator – and yet even in this ordinary, unelevated position it was still able to push the viewer out of its place. Approached from the front, this impulse to join the group is highly unlikely. It is as though the individual units create a force field or set of tensions between them that excludes the viewer. This is partly due to the way the units are arranged, which, as Lippard notes, makes their individuality come to the fore. They are peculiarly isolated but in a group. William Wilson describes this

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strange spatial balancing act in Hesse’s late sculptural work as causing ‘parts to stand together, but not to do much more than stand together’.41 He suggests she wanted to ‘preserve in visibility the threshold where the parts begin to enter a system but have not done so completely’.42 Of Repetition Nineteen I he says: ‘the units are placed apart from each other, just enough with each other to evoke the transition to a whole without completing the transition’.43 Wilson draws out the particular biographical resonances for Hesse of such spatial relations, pointing to her desire for solitude as well as intimacy.44 This desire is not unique to Hesse. It is also the story or struggle of many women artists at this historical juncture: to be with others (and, in particular, a significant other) but also to be independent, autonomous and separate. The early feminist demand for space is of course most clearly articulated by Virginia Woolf ’s famous essay ‘A room of one’s own’. In works such as Repetition Nineteen I, as Wilson notes, the demand for space, solitude and separation is balanced by Hesse’s refiguring of seriality as a very specific relation, what he calls ‘being with’.45 The units in Repetition Nineteen III also demonstrate this individuation alongside connection and relation – the units stand like a crowd of strangers maintaining a polite distance or, to return to Lippard’s botanical usage, like saplings that can only survive if the requisite spacing between them is observed. The gentle luminosity of the individual units helps to further stake a claim for space. The units’ glow seems to extend their borders, thereby literally creating a zone of occupation around each unit. Counterbalancing this emission outwards is the internal shadowing caused by the irregular and buckled bottoms, which reinforces the idea of a definite interior space. It is partly the delicate handling of extremes – light/shadow, attraction/repulsion, and individual/group – that generates the many different associations and feelings. The sense of restraint or the introverted emotional tone of the works means that the beholder is drawn alongside the work rather than being drawn into it. The strange identification with the work, a respectful non-intrusive being with, does not allow the kind of introjection or projection usually associated with this psychic mechanism. Rather, the beholder is, as it were, set back from the work and absorbed in their own associations. Comparisons have often been made between Repetition Nineteen III and Tori (1969) (Fig. 11). Tori, Lippard says, is like a defeated version of Repetition Nineteen III. Similarly, Briony Fer sees Tori as a reiteration of the tubular form of Repetition Nineteen III that ‘wrecks it from within’.46 The recumbent forms of Tori have a very different emotional tone to the quirky units of Repetition III,

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11 Eva Hesse, Tori, 1969 Polyester, resin, and fibreglass on wire mesh, Largest of nine units: 47 x 17 x 15 inches (119.4 x 43.2 x 38.1 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art: Purchased with funds contributed by Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Korman, Mr. and Mrs. Keith Sachs, Marion Boulton Stroud, Mr. and Mrs. Bayard T. Storey, and with other various funds, 1990 © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth Photograph: Eric Pollitzer

conveying a strong sense of melancholy. The emptiness of the units is emphasized by the gaping wound-like splits that suggest discarded insect carapaces or husks; in other words, remainders, organic detritus. The sense of spent flora or fauna is well captured by Lippard’s phrase ‘organic barrenness’.47 Life or vitality has left these forms. Hence they have been consistently compared to pods or husks, despite their large scale, which one might think would prevent this association (the units range from 34 to 47 inches in length and 12.5 to 17 inches in width). What such allusions capture, however, is the fact that the forms are easily associated with dispersal, loss and remains. If the comparison with Repetition Nineteen III is taken further, these nine recumbent forms are no longer able to maintain the distance necessary to ‘be with’ each other. They appear slightly deflated, despite their rigidity, and less independent. They must recline, or else support or props are needed – some rest on top of others, while one leans against the wall. Certainly they are unable to maintain the autonomy and individual space possessed by the earlier work. The repetition of the same or similar forms in a scattered arrangement underscores the feeling of abandon. This serial arrangement speaks less of

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a formation – a crocodile of schoolchildren, a stand of saplings – and more about the defeated or the cast-off. Yve-Alain Bois brilliantly captures the bodily allusion of such late works; he uses the metaphor of a toenail to indicate the hard yet fragile mortal substance. The live/dead material of toenails puts the image into contact with the extremes or polarities conjured by Repetition Nineteen III, however, compared to the latter, Tori has a much more coherent affective tone. It thereby approximates the more usual assumptions about the role of feeling in aesthetic experience already noted in chapter two. To briefly recap that argument, according to Edward Casey affective tone is one aspect of artistic expression – or, more correctly, what he refers to as the aesthetic surface of a work. The three components of the aesthetic surface are the affective qualities of an aesthetic object, its perceptual qualities, and its import or meaning. The affective dimension of a work of art, Casey argues, accounts for the cohesiveness of expression and the continuity between subject and object.48 In the case of Tori, unlike Repetition Nineteen III, the affective tone is coherent, identifiable and consistent with the formal properties of the work and its meaning. Both works are moving, but in the case of Repetition Nineteen III more effort is needed to determine why and in what way. The work is indicative of non-categorical affect.

3

Contingent

The final work I want to discuss, Contingent (1969), also has this strange uncategorizable affective dimension. Contingent shifts the serial format yet again. Here, the units are more than with each other, they are in procession. There is a strict formality about the linear installation of the units, reinforced by the uniform placement of them at right angles to the wall. This arrangement restricts the spatial investigation of the piece, despite the hovering presence of the individual components in our space. In early photographs of the work, such as the one taken by Geoffrey Clements that appeared on the cover of Artforum in 1970, the central sections of stretched rubberized cheesecloth (coated in latex) suggest not just canvas, as has often been noted, but also a strange amalgam of drapery and skin. The taut yet buckling surface suggests flayed hides drying out, thereby also evoking the missing volume they might once have enclosed and protected (Fig. 12). The unusual sideways view further emphasizes the play between two

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and three dimensions. The gaps between the wrinkling, withering material underscore the thinness of the units, the absence of a supporting volume. The sense of withering is even more accentuated now, 40 years after its manufacture, because the latex has darkened, hardened and deteriorated.49

12 Eva Hesse, Contingent, 1969 fibreglass, polyester resin, latex, cheesecloth, installation view at Finch College Museum of Art, New York 1969/70 National Gallery of Australia, Canberra 1974 © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

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In its current, darkened incarnation, the skinlike appearance is offset by the very visible texture of the woven cloth. The rectangular format also assists the shift of emphasis from skin to fabric. The rubberized ripple cloth is embedded at either end within crinkled fibreglass that echoes the textural possibilities of the fabric. The proportion of fabric to fibreglass, and the positioning of the fabric in the centre of the form, calls up the idea of a tunic or a shift clothing a figure, particularly as two of the eight forms seem to taper at the waist. With their textured drapery in formal procession, there is a faint classical reference: the side-on view is redolent of the processions of draped young women favoured by the high classical frieze, although the scale of this work – elements vary from nine and a half to eleven feet – complicates without disallowing this association. The disappearance or dissolution of these figures is also suggested. From some angles, Lippard says, it seems to hover in the air or to disintegrate at both ends.50 Viewed side-on, the work is very discreet, almost invisible. Walking alongside the panels, they seem to magically appear and disappear as they shift from large rectangular planes to the perpendicular view of sharp edges or narrow lines. Lippard refers to Contingent ‘as at once more detached and less associatable than most of Hesse’s work, transcending the whimsical to make a statement that is grand simply in its existence, and, at the same time, is as profoundly personal or intimate as a work of art can be’.51 Here, Lippard’s consistent identification of the contradictions Hesse brings together in her art continues. In this instance the work is described as at once detached and intimate, a grand and yet a personal statement. Contingent also transforms other extremes into continuities: skin/not skin, dead/living being, disintegration/preservation, beautiful/ugly, painting/sculpture. In a catalogue statement about Contingent, Hesse draws out different contradictions. She refers to the work as ‘see through, non see through, consistent, inconsistent’, and touching on its affective tone, contrasts the composition with the feel of the work: ‘tight and formal but very ethereal. sensitive. fragile.’52 The most marked contrast, however, is drawn by Anne Wagner between Lippard’s interpretation of Contingent and that of Anna Chave. While Lippard suggests Contingent is less associatable than Hesse’s other works, Chave identifies very violent and vivid associations. She describes it 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)’.53

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Here the contrast between fabric and skin is carried through to the extremes of the hospital, the charnel house and the concentration camp. Such associations, while more illustrative and particular than Hesse might have intended, nonetheless draw out something nascent in the work already canvassed in the more muted reference to fragility or disappearance, which, by only one further step of association, calls up mortality. That loose-weave fabric is used for bandages is undeniable, that the work resembles flayed skin is also hard to contradict. Chave makes apparent, through association, one side of a strange opposition that the work puts into play. The graphic and disturbing nature of Chave’s dramatization of decay and desecrated death sits alongside the stately grandeur conjured by Lippard’s description of the work’s singularity, its detached or freestanding presence and lack of associations. Contingent, then, has the complicated affective mood that Lippard describes as caught between emotions: the procession is impressive, frail, sad, elegant, ragged. Solicitous care and awe seem to result in equal measure. On the other hand, the anthropomorphism that allows terms such as sensitive or frail to apply to the units or figures is co-present with the lifelessness, suffering and loss suggested by an inhuman rack of hanging remains. What sense can we make of this very pronounced capacity of Hesse’s art to arouse conflicting associations and emotions?

4

unconscious affect

Ignacio Matte-Blanco, the Chilean psychoanalyst, has argued against Freud’s famous pronouncements that affect cannot be unconscious. As noted in chapter two, the Freudian approach to affects emphasizes that they are to be felt or expressed and hence are a dimension of consciousness.54 The opposition between ideas and affects, where ideas can be unconscious but not affects, is most clearly stated in Freud’s paper of 1915, ‘The unconscious’. Freud states: ‘there are no unconscious affects as there are unconscious ideas.’55 The distinction is made between the suppression of affect, relative to the repression of the idea in the following terms: ‘unconscious ideas continue to exist after repression as actual structures in the system Ucs., whereas all that corresponds in that system to unconscious affects is a potential beginning which is prevented from developing.’56 He concludes: ‘The whole difference arises from the fact that ideas are cathexes – basically of memory-traces – whilst affects and emotions correspond to processes of discharge, the final manifestation

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of which are perceived as feelings.’57 From this brief summary it is clear that affect is not unconscious for Freud, although his position on the vicissitudes of affect does shift over time, as André Green has noted.58 Matte-Blanco disputes the classic Freudian position by drawing attention to the similarities between feeling and the unconscious; both, he says, are opposed to thinking and both have the character he describes as indivisibility. The indivisibility of the unconscious is his rephrasing of Freud’s idea that the unconscious is characterized by an absence of contradictions. MatteBlanco explains indivisibility as ‘a set which contains all affirmations and their corresponding negations.’59 He argues that feeling is ‘highly saturated with the indivisible mode’ and that, consequently, any clear division between emotion and the unconscious is impossible to make.60 To a reader of Charles Darwin or Silvan Tomkins, adherents to the idea of categorical affects, this approach to affect may seem rather odd. These theorists of affect and emotion work on the assumption that emotions can be classified and clearly distinguished from one another. In the case of Tomkins, eight affects (later nine) are ‘hardwired into the human biological system’, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank put it.61 According to Tomkins, affects, not drives, are the chief engines of motivation.62 He divides affects into three categories, then each affect is also described according to a sliding scale of intensity: the positive affects (enjoyment–joy, interest–excitement), resetting (surprise–startle) and negative affects (fear–terror, shame–humiliation, distress–anguish, anger–rage, contempt–disgust).63 The affects are also clearly distinguished by the density of neural firing; for example, fear and interest have a sharp increase in firing, while joy and laughter involve a marked decrease.64 In this framework it is hard to account for a state, such as that attributed to Hesse’s work, of being caught between emotions, or indeed having a positive and a negative emotion simultaneously. Matte-Blanco’s account of feeling as indivisible, however, addresses the kind of experience Hesse’s art provokes. To explain his approach to affect, Matte-Blanco sharply contrasts thinking and feeling. He contends that we can describe what we are thinking or perceiving ‘with precision’ whereas descriptions of our feeling are ‘always hazy’.65 In other words, he argues that in relation to our own feelings we have none of the clarity or capacity for ‘macular vision’ that we have with thinking and perception.66 He suggests that one possible explanation for this haziness about emotions is because they ‘seem to have a greater number of dimensions than that with which our self-awareness is capable of dealing’.67 This explanation aligns feeling with the unconscious; it refers specifically to

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Matte-Blanco’s mathematical account of the unconscious where the space of the unconscious is characterized as having more dimensions than that of perceptions and conscious thinking. Matte-Blanco’s assimilation of feeling into the unconscious is most clearly demonstrated by what he calls, following Melanie Klein, ‘memories in feelings’.68 To explain this concept he cites clinical material in which a particular analysand transfers his feelings for his parents to Matte-Blanco in his role as analyst. In turn, the analysand displaces or transfers those feelings for MatteBlanco onto yet another person. Matte-Blanco notes that the analysand is even amused by the further transport of his feelings to this other person.69 In the clinical setting, the repetition of feelings in the transference, the actual re-experiencing of them in the highly framed situation of analysis, appears to be the only way to get some perspective or insight into them. In short, Matte-Blanco cites the linchpin of psychoanalytic practice – transference – in support of his view that feelings are like the unconscious insofar as they are saturated with the indivisible. Feelings, in the transference at least, do not clearly distinguish between people, just as the unconscious is populated by ideas that are not distinguished – Matte-Blanco’s higher dimensions. Another example Matte-Blanco provides for the alignment of feeling with the unconscious and the indivisible is a story repeated several times by Freud. Significantly, the story appears in Freud’s book on jokes. It concerns a blacksmith who has committed a crime that warrants the death penalty. However, as he is the only blacksmith in the town, whereas there were three tailors, a tailor is hanged for the blacksmith’s crime. Matte-Blanco notes that, from the point of view of thinking, the tailor should not be punished, but from the point of view of feeling, they are the same person.70 Or, to put it another way, the joke-maker is able to tap into the indivisible mode of the unconscious for comic effect, just as the audience of the joke shares this same pleasure in indivisible absurd conjunctions. It is perhaps to Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious that one needs to turn to make sense of Hesse’s work. Her capacity to produce works that allow multiple and contradictory associations and affects is the gift of the joke-maker, someone who can plunge ‘thought into the unconscious’ and bring back up the play with words or, in her case, materials and images, that allows a very particular kind of dense and multi-layered communication.71 In turn, this capacity of Hesse’s with materials, like the joke, resonates with the viewer’s unconscious, calling up the indivisibility that is the hallmark of primary process thinking.

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Freud’s study of the joke is often ignored when thinking about his contributions to aesthetics, yet his account of joke formation and joke reception offers a more nuanced account of art production than his more commonly cited example of sublimation. According to the Freudian theory of sublimation, art is the result of a vicissitude of the drive. Art serves first the artist, and then by proxy the viewer, as a substitute for wishes and pleasures foregone or forbidden.72 It is thus a shared cultural consolation for giving up the more primary pleasures of the self. Such a tale of renunciation tells us little about art itself; rather, the stress tends to fall on the artist’s life, as in the famous example set by Freud’s study of Leonardo da Vinci.73 While it is true that the joker-maker’s particular utilization of the indivisible mode, as Freud notes, may well also derive from the kind of personal circumstances that form neurotic illness, as he also highlights, jokes circulate anonymously so that knowledge of such circumstances are not necessary to enjoy the joke.74 The stress on the social, rather than the personal, dimension of joke production and consumption is an inevitable consequence of the normal mode of joke circulation. In relation to art, of course, there is rarely such anonymity, but to interpret the unconscious dimension of art or its affective qualities, similarly does not require detailed knowledge of its producer’s biography. In Hesse’s case, the resonance of her art with the viewer’s unconscious may stir up a sense of uncertainty that could call for some kind of resolution, such as might seem to be solved by recourse to the artist’s biography. With this in mind, it is interesting to note that despite the acknowledgement of the expressive and affective qualities of Hesse’s work, there is disquiet about these aspects of her work, even in the recent feminist literature. The trend seems to be to register the affective dimension, or at the very least to name it, before cancelling it out.75 The affective tensions and contradictions that Hesse’s work embodies are thereby lost or finessed. The irresolute and irresolvable nature of such contradictory feelings is what makes Hesse’s art so intriguing and, for some, perhaps a little difficult. The stress on the blankness of Hesse’s work, or the cancellation or stripping away of affect, however, is one way of registering a further contradiction in her art. The sense of unbound feeling that generates so many associations is counterweighted by her very refined and restrained aesthetic, which binds and mutes the expression of feeling. In this last contradiction, I believe, lies the extraordinarily suggestive power of her work. Her work calls up extreme feelings, as Hesse put it, but not simply her identifiable personal

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feelings. Viewers identify with the absurd, barely anthropomorphic, forms. Not as part-objects, where idealization and persecutory hatred would be the dominant antithetical affects, but rather as oddly alien forms, forms at once familiar and foreign, as if from the ‘other scene’ of the unconscious. Perhaps this is what Hesse hoped for when she wrote her catalogue statement in 1969 for Art in Process IV, an exhibition in which Contingent first appeared: I remember I wanted to get to non art, non connative, non anthropomorphic, non geometric, non, nothing, everything, but of another kind, vision, sort. from a total other reference point.76

If the ‘other reference point’ is the domain of the indivisible described by Matte-Blanco as the multi-dimensional space beyond the conscious domains of perception and thinking, we might conclude that Hesse’s wish or hope was indeed fulfilled.

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5

Ana Mendieta: Affect Miniaturization, Emotional Ties and the Silueta Series

My earth-body sculptures are not the final stage of a ritual but a way and a means of asserting my emotional ties with nature and conceptualising religion and culture. Ana Mendieta1 My work is basically in the tradition of a Neolithic artist. It has very little to do with most earth art. I’m not interested in the formal qualities of my materials, but their emotional and sensual ones. Ana Mendieta 2

‘Visceral’ and ‘haunting’ are two adjectives that are frequently used to describe the earth-body sculptures of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta.3 Both suggest strong emotion. The word ‘visceral’ certainly conjures the idea of basic or primal desires or feelings, alongside the implication that such feelings are aroused immediately. ‘Haunting’ gives a more definite idea of the affective tone of the work – sadness, melancholy, with perhaps an edge of uneasiness. It also suggests that the response to the images is more prolonged or perhaps even delayed, as though it is the memory of them that is most affecting. This contrast – immediate impact versus delayed – is further complicated by another contrast or contradiction that applies to her work: it is expressive, as the descriptors ‘visceral’ or ‘haunting’ indicate, and it is the opposite – anti- or non-expressive. This non-expressive characterization has only come to the fore as Mendieta’s work has been included in more mainstream art-historical exhibitions, where it 92

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is assumed to adhere to the typical non-expressive protocols of art of the 1960s and 1970s. For example, Mendieta’s work featured in the exhibition of 2000, Postmedia: Conceptual Photography in the Guggenheim Museum Collection, where the general approach of the artists was described in the following way by the curator Nancy Spector: ‘Artists used photography as a means to contest the autonomous art object and transgress the medium-based categories of modernism. As a hybrid medium, the photograph was used to create works that privileged art-as-activity over art-as-product and documentary evidence over expression.’4 Mendieta, like Marina Abramovic and Vito Acconci, is then described as using photography ‘as a record of the performative, corporeal gesture’. Immediate impact and delayed impact, expressive and not expressive: how can these different characterizations be applied to the same works? When confronted with innumerable contrasting readings of the pose of Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses, Freud was convinced he could find an interpretation, in keeping with the artist’s intention, that would reconcile them (if not surpass them all) by focusing on neglected details.5 In the case of Mendieta, that overlooked detail is the affective dimension of her work. Accounting for how and why her earth-body sculptures are affecting, and the exact nature of that expressiveness, will resolve what at first appear to be contradictory characterizations. This chapter, then, examines how the earth-body sculptures in Ana Mendieta’s Silueta Series are visceral and haunting, as well as expressive and non-expressive. Of all Mendieta’s works the Silueta Series has garnered the most critical attention. It is widely acknowledged to be Mendieta’s key aesthetic achievement: Mary Sabbatino has argued it is the core of her practice, and Guy Brett has called it her great contribution to art.6 Generally, it is dated from 1973 to 1980 and can be described as including those works which resulted from Mendieta either placing her body, or constructing a surrogate form of herself, on what she regarded as the maternal earth. The resulting images, documented by Super-8 film, slides and photographs, visualize the idea of a feminized earth by showing her body or its imprint incorporated into various natural environments: rivers, the air, the land, and the liminal zones of seashore and riverbank. In the first section of this chapter I consider how this series intertwines key moments of the life cycle with different ways of presenting the classical theme of the figure in the landscape. The simplicity and directness of Mendieta’s ground drawings and earth-sculptures is belied by the complex ways in which she permutes the figure/ground relation while also invoking

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such fundamental themes as birth, death and life. The second section examines Mendieta’s positioning in relation to conceptual art. In particular, her work is considered in relation to Jörg Heiser’s idea of ‘romantic conceptualism’ and the work of Bas Jan Ader – an artist whose work also combines expressive and non-expressive elements.7 It is in the context of this recent repositioning that the subtle sedition of Mendieta’s addition of emotion to the language of conceptual art is most keenly felt.

1 t h e S il u e t a S e r i e s a n d e m o t i o n a l t i e s: visceral and haunting Images Through the making of earth/body works I become one with the earth. It is like being encompassed by nature, an afterimage of the original shelter within the womb ... This obsessive act of reasserting my ties with the earth is an objectification of my existence ... The works recall prehistoric beliefs of an omnipresent female force whose body parts made the earth a living creature. Ana Mendieta8

These excerpts from a short artist’s-statement made by Ana Mendieta in 1982 summarize some of the key ways in which she thought about her earthbody sculptures: that is, as communion, or even merger, with the landscape; as putting her stamp upon it; and finally as animating or anthropomorphizing the earth. Ordinarily, it would be difficult to imagine these different relations between earth and body being brought together, however this is precisely what the Silueta Series achieves. As we will see shortly, these conjoined relations are at the heart of the affective dimension of this work. These complicated relations between the figure and the environment are inflected by key themes such as the seasons and cycles of nature (birth, growth, death) – or ‘eros and death and life’, as Mendieta describes the central ideas of her work.9 These elemental themes, and the variety of ways in which they are presented, are the chief source of the visceral qualities of the series. That is, the most basic and inescapable facts of the life cycle are presented directly and simply and yet in a way that subtly imbricates them. The entanglement of life and death, or Eros and Thanatos, adds yet another paradoxical state to the characterization of the series. To unpack such contradictions requires an examination of how the themes are presented, as well as

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how they are intertwined. The slippages between these different ideas, and the three different relations Mendieta describes, are what make the series haunting and just a little disquieting. The themes of birth, growth and death are not all present in each single image or film, but emerge most forcefully when the series is considered as a whole. For example, some images specifically show the demise or disintegration of the figure, such as the sequence of colour slides shot in Mexico that shows waves moving over and destroying a red silhouette in the tidal zone (Fig. 13). Water also serves as an agent of dissolution in the film Silueta de Yemanya (Flower Person) 1975, which traces the path of a floral silhouette carried along and eventually broken up by a strong river current. Fire is as an element of destruction in two short films, Ánima, Silueta de Cohetes (Soul, Silhouette of Fireworks) (1976) and Alma Silueta en Fuego (Soul Silhouette on Fire) (1975), which capture flames illuminating, while also destroying, female figures posed respectively against sky and earth. Images that suggest life and growth include the photograph Mendieta describes as the first work of the series, Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul) (1973), where she is depicted lying on her back in an ancient Mexican tomb with flowers seeming to sprout from her naked body (Fig. 14). Works made with live material, such as the muddy figure supporting various grasses in Untitled (Silueta Series, Iowa) (1978), also conform to this characterization (Fig. 15). Life in these instances is also often enmeshed with decay; growth and fecundity is made possible by the rich soil of decomposition. Ultimately, all of the images fall under the spell of disappearance, whether this is shown or not, because the silhouettes are ephemeral. They are abandoned to the elements and will be ‘reclaimed by the earth’, as Mendieta put it.10 Her insistently impermanent constructions underscore the inevitable future of the silhouettes, the time after their creation – or, to bring these two moments together, the future anterior. In other words, we can say with absolute certainty when looking at the Siluetas: this one will have melted and that one will have wilted, eroded or washed away. The actual or imagined disappearance of the figures, with its strong intimations of mortality, gives the images a melancholic or mournful quality. At issue in the Silueta Series are two types of disappearance of the body. The threat of extinction is underscored by another disappearance, the evacuation of Mendieta’s actual body from the series, which takes place roughly around 1975. One of the consequences of her withdrawal is a more open relationship between the earth and the body. The relationship becomes

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13 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Mexico), 1976 35 mm colour slide © The Estate of Ana Mendieta. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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14 Ana Mendieta, Imagen de Yagul (Image from Yagul), 1973 lifetime colour photograph, 19 x 12 1/2 inches (48.3 x 31.8 cm) © The Estate of Ana Mendieta. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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15 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Iowa), 1978 lifetime colour photograph, 10 x 8 inches (25.5 x 20.5 cm) © The Estate of Ana Mendieta. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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necessarily porous because the depicted or constructed body is continuous with the natural world. A vivid demonstration of relational identity is made possible under these conditions: the body is deeply dependent on the environment, being constructed from the very stuff of that environment. The making of silhouettes outdoors and with organic materials – as it were, with the earth and on the earth – has a distinctly visceral appeal. The sheer animality of our existence, its physicality and dependence on brute matter, is well captured in this mode of depiction. This insertion in the land has an immediate sensual appeal, both on account of Mendieta’s materials (flowers, mud, ice) and the associations of plunging into the earth. One might think of the latter as like toes sunk into warm sand or hands working the soil, as well as being redolent of our final return to the elements. Despite the disappearance of Mendieta herself from the frame, her body continues to provide the template for the silhouettes in the minimal form of her height or the more exact form of an outline of her body. This muted form of self-representation without individualized features means it is at once her in particular, and potentially every person that is reconnected to the earth. The effacement of distinguishing features gives a blank quality to the figures, suggesting a retreat or withdrawal of personality. Luis Camnitzer refers to the Siluetas more poignantly as ‘empty’.11 Emptiness further underscores the air of melancholy, sorrow and vulnerability. Viewed as lacking or vulnerable, the Siluetas seem to address us as if they require something from us; perhaps minimally they need our projections to animate them and to care about their obliteration. Or the demand may be more challenging: to ward off their inevitable fate. To prevent them from being consigned to the ground in the manner of the funeral ceremony they seem to embody ‘earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. At the very least, viewers must bear witness to their brief existence. The finality of this kind of disappearance is counterweighted, however, by the insistent appearance of the figures. If disappearance is one way to understand the absorption or merger of the figure into the landscape, then the silhouette as a kind of self-portrait adheres to the second relationship Mendieta describes – an objectification of her existence. Some images in the series suggest this more strongly than others; the images where the figure is almost camouflaged contrast with others where the figure stands out from the environment, seeming to brand the earth, as it were, claiming it with Mendieta’s signature form. It is here that the power of the serial method she employs is particularly evident. Repetition emphasizes the series of captured

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moments when the figures were present, allowing preservation to sit alongside the suggestion of disappearance. The sheer quantity of repeated actions – Mendieta made over 100 Siluetas – insists upon the presence of the body in nature, underscoring the constancy as well as the variability of the depiction of the body. In short, the photographs and films permanently hold onto that series of moments when Mendieta was there, as well as pointing us forward to the work of time and nature. Considering the series from this angle, Mendieta’s relationship to the earth changes dramatically. Instead of a merger with the earth – what she describes as a kind of submission to it, ‘a voluntary submersion and total identification with nature’ – she asserts herself by inscribing her image on the land.12 She claims the land as well as being claimed by it, demonstrating an active territorial impulse. Mendieta acknowledges this impulse when she very colourfully describes her practice of marking the earth as ‘like a dog, pissing on the ground’.13 The third relation Mendieta describes shifts the signification of the Silueta. Instead of standing for Mendieta’s existence, it personifies nature. When considered in this light, the silhouettes have a curious, ancient quality, recalling both goddess imagery and ancient rock carvings. Mendieta had a longstanding interest in the art of ancient cultures, which suggests her familiarity with such imagery.14 Explaining the sources of her iconography, she told Linda Montana that ‘when I first started working this way, I felt a very strong Catholic connection, but as I continued to work, I felt closer to the Neolithic.’15 Her most legible imagery recalls the pose of the goddess with outstretched arms familiar from statues of the Minoan snake goddess, among many other ancient sculptures and reliefs, and which are found in the work of her contemporaries Mary Beth Edelson and Carolee Schneemann (Fig. 13).16 She also has a variant form of this goddess pose with the arms closer to the body. There are at least three other key poses Mendieta used for the silhouettes. In the late 1970s the goddess pose is not used; as Olga Viso notes, Mendieta favoured ‘non-gender-specific figural references’, such as the mummy-like form (Fig. 16).17 Mendieta referred to some of these works from 1977 as her ‘Tut-inspired work’.18 Her other two poses, one with arms by the side, and the more contained form with truncated arms that she also frequently uses, have a less clear provenance, although the latter may be modelled on Neolithic statuettes with folded arms or the Sardinian Great Mother figure discussed by Lucy Lippard (Fig. 17).19

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Several critics have commented on the tension between the ancient practice of drawing in and on nature, and the modern distancing technology of film and photography.20 Integrating modern technology also enables the complicated futurity of Mendieta’s recorded images to permeate the representation of Mother Nature. That is, the photographs and slides, in particular, capture a traditional figurative mode of representing the live earth, as well as suggesting entropic nature, the anticipated force of dissolution mentioned earlier. In other words, living nature is not simply the body of woman embedded in the land, animate nature is also figured as different kinds of processes, either depicted or imagined, such as erosion, decomposition, growth and so forth. This representation of nature as process or force contrasts with the short films that feature Mendieta’s body in direct contact with the earth – her most stunning representations of the themes of birth and eros. The short films Genesis in Mud and Corazón de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood) (both 1975) most explicitly present her idea of an emotional bond with the earth. In Genesis in Mud Mendieta is immersed in earth. The idea of her birth in and of the elements, announced by the title, is conveyed by the slow revelation of her form facing upwards below a layer of mud, her chest rising and falling as

16 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series), 1980 lifetime black-and-white photograph, 8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm) © The Estate of Ana Mendieta. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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17 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Iowa), 1979 lifetime colour photograph, 20 x 13 ¼ inches (50.96 x 33.18 cm) © The Estate of Ana Mendieta. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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18 Ana Mendieta, Corazón de Roca con Sangre (Rock Heart with Blood), 1975 still from Super-8 colour, silent film, 3 min © The Estate of Ana Mendieta. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

evidence of breath and life. The film reverses the usual meaning of entombment in earth, entwining burial with birth. Rock Heart with Blood is like the bookend to Genesis in Mud: the body, as it were, returns to the earth (Fig. 18). Mendieta with spare, untheatrical gestures pours red pigment over a heart shape set in the chest area of a recessed ash silhouette, the remnants of Soul Silhouette on Fire. She places her naked body face down into the cavity, uniting the body and its double in a glove-like fit. The final movement of union presents intimate contact with the earth, not quite an embrace or a caress, but certainly in the domain of some kind of close communion. Even in the latter fairly straightforward representation of an intimate emotional tie between Mendieta and the earth (the artist’s naked body united with its Mendieta-shaped niche) the image has a stark quality that draws back from the romantic associations that her phrase ‘become one with the earth’ might suggest. ‘Oneness with the earth’ usually describes a mystical experience in a romantic vein – what is often described as an ‘oceanic feeling’. Freud attributed this expression to his friend Romain Rolland. For Rolland it describes the basic impulse that informs all religions. Freud explains its meaning using what he reports are Rolland’s terms. It is: ‘a sensation of “eternity”, a

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feeling as of something limitless, unbounded – as it were, “oceanic.” ’21 Freud’s further attempt to characterize this feeling closely follows Mendieta’s way of figuring her desire for union with the earth; he describes it as ‘a feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external world as a whole.’22 This kind of blissful union with the world may have been Mendieta’s experience when making the Siluetas, but it is not the predominant feeling of the resulting images. On the occasions when larger amounts of landscape are visible, the locations are deserted, and often desolate, suggesting a challenge, if not a threat, to human dwelling and existence (Fig. 19). Similarly, the traces of the solitary figure in these images evoke a strong sense of isolation, aloneness, even loneliness, alongside the assertion of a temporary place in nature. In other words, the emotional tie that we see in these images is more complicated than the idea of euphoric oneness with the universe. There is a dark edge to the union of body and land that makes the tie more ambivalent than joyful communion. This ambivalence is even more evident in images where the figure is very tightly framed and there is no horizon or landscape as such. This tight framing of many of the figures, coupled with the persistent tilt of the picture plane, makes the images just a little disorienting and claustrophobic. The latter term

19 Ana Mendieta, Untitled (Silueta Series, Iowa), 1978 35mm colour slide © The Estate of Ana Mendieta. Courtesy Galerie Lelong, New York

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recalls the dual meanings of being encompassed by the earth: it can just as easily mean being swallowed up by it, as being supported. The ambivalence about enclosure is a feature of many of Mendieta’s images. These negative and positive meanings of being encompassed or enclosed are well explained by Silvan Tomkins. The positive meaning Tomkins has called ‘claustral joy’, conveying the sense of a supportive enveloping environment such as one might experience in solitude communing with nature, or the claustral interpenetration of the mutual embrace where each person is inside the other. Equally, being encompassed can mean the unpleasant sense of restriction, suffocation and confinement that comes from claustrophobia. Tomkins notes how the memory or fantasy of the intra-uterine state underpins these contrasting senses of enclosure.23 Mendieta’s images combine, then, a ritualized communion with nature – a celebration of its power and diversity in which the body participates – and paradoxically, alongside the celebration, there is also a feeling of immobility, and restriction. This ambivalent sense of enclosure – constricted and threatening as well as supportive – is perhaps why Mendieta’s images are frequently described as haunting, chilling, powerful, moving or uncanny. An ambivalent conception of emotional ties correlates with Freud’s account of primary identification.24 Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen notes that Freud links the earliest emotional tie to destruction – the ‘devouring identification’ of oral incorporation that destroys the very thing that is desired. Merger in this account combines love and hate, binding and unbinding. Borch-Jacobsen concludes that ‘it is only in the amorous destruction of the “object”, in the cannibal-like (non)relation with the other, that death and life are born’.25 Ego formation, he further argues, is predicated upon such incorporations. A major source of uneasiness about Mendieta’s images is precisely the confusion about who or what is incorporating whom. Is it the figure incorporating the land or the land incorporating the figure? Here the power of the three intertwined relations between body and land comes into play: there is an easy slippage across the different relations. The figure can be considered as personified and active, rendered passive and at the mercy of nature, or alternatively in dialogue with nature where both are active. Each way of thinking about the Siluetas is haunted by the others. Rather like an optical illusion, it is hard to see or imagine all three simultaneously. The other permutations or possibilities create the temporal lag that characterizes the haunting character of the series. While they are hard to think together, these alternative ways of configuring the earth/body relation nonetheless disturb the straightforward perception of

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the series. The complicated permutations around the figure/ground relation are made more unsettling when birth is linked with death and emotional ties are at once a bond of love and potentially a form of annexation.

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t h e S il u e t a S e r i e s: ex p r e s s i ve n e s s a n d r e s t r a i n t There is nothing worse than seeing art that wallows in gaudy baubles. Sol LeWitt 26 Beauty is exactly what helps us to survive. That is one of the issues I have with political art. You see a lot of ugly political art. Now who’s going to save our soul and our spirit. You need beauty in the world if you are going to survive. Ana Mendieta 27

Much of the scholarship about the Silueta Series, my own included, has revolved around Mendieta’s contribution to the important conjunction of the 1970s: art and feminism.28 In particular, her work has been a touchstone for feminist discussions about the representation of femininity and the female body, and the attendant debates about essentialist or postmodern performative approaches to female identity. Performative accounts of her work have emphasized her link to the work of feminist philosopher Judith Butler. That the Silueta Series emphasizes the gestures of the body over consistent depictions of it can be seen to conform to the linchpin of Butler’s idea of gender as performance – the priority of the deed over the doer. As Butler explains: ‘there need not be a “doer behind the deed”, but that the “doer” is variably constructed in and through the deed.’29 In contrast, my own approach examined how Mendieta transforms an essentialist idea – the alignment of woman with space or nature – to generate alternatives to patriarchal conceptions of nature, dwelling, space and identity. The Siluetas demonstrate an attitude of care in relation to animate nature and advocate a kind of dwelling best described as touching the earth lightly: her marks on the landscape leave no permanent traces. Her eco-feminist orientation comes to the fore in this interpretation. The interpretative fecundity of Mendieta’s art is well demonstrated by its capacity to sustain such contrasting readings, as well as accommodating the changing concerns of different times. For example, in the 1980s and 1990s her work was richly embroiled in debates about identity politics that dominated academic art history. In particular, her art was interpreted in relation

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to issues such as displacement, exile and intercultural identity. In the current decade, as Mendieta’s work begins to enter the mainstream, different tensions and fault-lines appear. John Perreault has recently noted that the interpretation of Mendieta’s work shifts quite dramatically with her successful insertion into art history, and the comparisons with her contemporaries and predecessors that this insertion demands. Perreault was one of the curators of the first Mendieta retrospective at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York in 1987 and is thus well placed to observe the changes in the reception of her work and, in particular, to review the most recent retrospective, Ana Mendieta: Earth, Body, Sculpture and Performance 1972–1985, curated by Olga Viso in 2004. In his review of that exhibition he draws attention to the links made between Mendieta’s work and Viennese Actionism as well as the comparison with Yves Klein’s Anthropometries. He very succinctly captures one of the shifts such comparisons make possible: ‘Paradoxically, as her moment recedes she will more and more embody the ethos of her time.’30 It is precisely because Mendieta now appears to embody the ethos of her time that her links to other emblematic art movements of the 1960s and 1970s can be perceived and explored. It is under these new circumstances that her work may appear to prioritize documentation over expression and to adhere to a system-based or ideas-driven approach. This new positioning can be seen most strikingly by her inclusion in survey exhibitions about the art of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Postmedia, the Guggenheim collection exhibition mentioned earlier, that examined the impact of conceptual art on photography, a theme continued by another major survey exhibition in which her work also featured, The Last Picture Show: Artists Using Photography 1960–1982, curated by Douglas Fogle in 2003. This mainstream positioning would have been unlikely, if not unthought of, in the previous decade. For example, Mendieta’s work was not included in the expanded account of conceptual art presented by the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, curated by Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver and Rachel Weiss in 1999. By way of contrast, both Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Lygia Clark were included in this exhibition. In a similar vein, surprising art-historical contextualizations of her method have begun to be made. For instance, Guy Brett, when drawing attention to her serial method in his catalogue essay for the 2004 retrospective, notes that Mendieta referred to the Siluetas as ‘a long series that will never end’. 31 Brett interprets this statement as showing the influence of minimalist seriality. He states: ‘It is tempting to wonder if she would ever have arrived at such a telling

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effect of simplicity and seriality if she had not been exposed to the minimalist aesthetic.’32 While Mendieta’s art has previously been presented as part of a feminist approach to postminimalism in the exhibition More than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 1970s, the link to minimalist seriality is a fresh insight, available as her work comes to ‘embody’ her time.33 Seriality is, of course, one of the methods meant to subdue the force or personality of artistic expression. Whether it is the deadpan repetition of minimalism – Donald Judd’s ‘one thing after another’ – or the quasi-scientific, ‘methodical’, serial attitude advocated by Mel Bochner, most descriptions of seriality in the late modern period underscore the impersonal manner of generating multiples.34 Sol LeWitt famously compares the serial artist with a bureaucrat. In ‘Serial project no.1’, a description of his installation at Dwan Gallery in New York in 1966, he says: ‘The serial artist does not attempt to produce a beautiful or mysterious object but functions merely as a clerk cataloguing the results of the premise.’35 The importance ascribed to the premise or proposition, which generates the series, is intended to signal the priority of ideas over feelings, and method over manner or style. LeWitt summarizes this intention very succinctly in his ‘Paragraphs on conceptual art’ when he states: ‘To work with a plan that is pre-set is one way of avoiding subjectivity.’36 Under these conditions, as Bochner asserts, ‘order takes precedent over execution’ and a ‘predetermined process’ is followed until it is exhausted.37 Works that illustrate this dispassionate, ‘self-exhausting’ serial method might include projects such as Ed Ruscha’s photographic documentation of every building on Sunset Strip, Every Building on Sunset Strip (1966), or Bochner’s own Measurement Room (1969), which also embodies its title – measuring the rooms of various exhibition spaces and recording the dimensions on the walls themselves. This account of seriality underscores the familiar wisdom about the first phase of conceptual art, classified by Benjamin Buchloh as being dominated by an ‘aesthetic of administration’.38 Buchloh’s bureaucratic term, like LeWitt’s clerk, brings to mind the idea that the artist simply follows a method in an impersonal (perhaps mindless) manner, without question, without deviation, like a good civil servant. Buchloh links the refiguring of authorship that results from this method to Barthes’ infamous essay, ‘The death of the author’, which appeared in Aspen Magazine 5–6 in 1966 alongside LeWitt’s ‘Serial project’ essay cited above.39 Buchloh’s analysis ultimately favours conceptual practices that perform a more pointed form of institutional critique, however his characterization of the impersonal nature of conceptual

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art underscores the affective continuity presumed to unite minimalism and conceptual art. In short, the serial method, or the serial attitude, is another strategy understood to excise, suppress or repress subjectivity and feeling. There are many features that Mendieta’s Silueta Series shares with these accounts of seriality. The Silueta Series certainly privileges ideas over form insofar as Mendieta uses the deskilled mode of documentation prevalent at the time, where the idea captured has priority over the filmic or photographic qualities of the resulting images. In other words, she adheres to the trend to de-emphasize media and materials so well described by LeWitt. He argues that ‘making the physicality of materials so important that it becomes the idea of the work’ is ‘another kind of expressionism’.40 The aim, of course, is to avoid this kind of eclipse. In line with this aim, the photographs in the Silueta Series, while displaying careful and precise framing, nonetheless conform to what Helen Molesworth describes as conceptual art’s ‘do-it-yourself ’ aesthetic: they do not emphasize fine-art photography protocols.41 Instead, the colour images have a slightly dulled-down or subdued appearance, partly because they are printed from 35 mm slides and hence the prints are not high resolution or glossy. In keeping with the serial method, the silhouette is represented in a consistent manner in the films, photographs and slides. Not in a relentlessly repetitive fashion, the zenith of which would be the austere photographs of Berndt and Hilla Becher, whose serial images of water towers and various industrial structures rigorously adhere to consistent lighting, tone and an insistently frontal point of view. In the Silueta Series the figure in the landscape is usually in the centre of the image and the framing of the figure is quite tight: the land is not shown as a capacious or comfortable habitat for the body. Additionally, there is a persistent tilt to most of the images: the land seems to rise away from the viewer, and he or she is positioned as if looking down at the earth. Most importantly for Mendieta’s adherence to a serial approach, a central premise or proposition drives the series – the depiction of the relationship of her body or its silhouette with nature. The proposition, however, is not self-exhausting; there are endless permutations that could be pursued with no logical termination point. In other words, the series is open rather than self-exhausting, or ‘self-enclosed’ as Mark Godfrey puts it.42 Godfrey argues photography prised open the self-referential, solipsistic character of serial art, as it were, bringing the world in.43 He contrasts the serial structures used by minimalist artists – the self-contained and non-referential systems of grids

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and cubes – with the serial photographic works of conceptual artists such as John Baldessari, Hans Haacke, Douglas Huebler and Bas Jan Ader. Godfrey thereby draws attention to a marked shift in notions of seriality between minimalism and conceptual art, made possible by photography’s claims to referentiality. Godfrey also notes the shift in sensibility from relentlessly impersonal art to the injection of comedy and feeling in the work of Charles Ray and Bas Jan Ader.44 The work of Ader is a good counterpoint for considering the affective tone of Mendieta’s Silueta Series. Ader’s art has been classified as ‘romantic conceptualism’ in an effort to counteract the characterization of conceptual art as relentlessly and deliberately ‘emotionally dry’, to cite LeWitt’s instructions on the matter.45 In the case of Ader, his classification as a romantic conceptualist also captures the knowing replay of romantic tropes his work performs, such as the studied repetition of the cultivation of sentiment prized by the Romantics. A key work in these discussions is the short silent film, I’m too Sad to Tell You (1971), which consists of a close-up of the artist crying, preceded by the handwritten title of the work. The work cleverly engages the anti-expressive stance of conceptual art, managing to at once promise, deliver and withhold feeling. The trope of the romantic, expressive artist (I’m sharing my sadness with you, see me weep) is undercut by the withholding anti-expressive artist (I’m too sad to tell you, and in any case my film is silent). The clash of sensibilities gives Ader’s work an understated, absurd quality that delivers the distance or humour necessary to partially distinguish the work from the thing it appears to represent – distress. Mark Godfrey and Jan Verwoert maintain that Ader’s work is nonetheless moving.46 In relation to I’m too Sad to Tell You, Verwoert argues ‘neither the conceptual framing nor the rhetorical character relativizes the emotional truth of Ader’s display of sadness’.47 While I agree that the film is moving, the conceptual framing is not redundant, it does complicate the emotion shown. Verwoert’s argument partly rests on the idea that, as he puts it: ‘Crying is one of the most basic and straightforward ways to communicate sadness.’48 To some extent this is true: crying is one of those mimetic corporeal activities, like yawning or vomiting, that is hard to observe without a similar sentiment or reaction being stirred in the viewer. Hence watching Arbeit Macht Frei (1973), Stuart Brisley’s film of him continuously vomiting, can make the observer feel quite nauseous even without the much more potent effects of smell. The much less private activity of yawning also provokes an immediate

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reaction: I watch someone yawn and unknowingly replicate the same action. Crying, however, is somewhat different. As a sign of distress, it can certainly elicit what Silvan Tomkins calls the desire for remedial action, either on the part of the person feeling the distress or an observer.49 That said, the vision of an adult male crying could also make some viewers feel very uncomfortable; the uninhibited distress of an adult can be experienced as invasive, overwhelming or confronting and thereby elicit aversion as much as empathy. In other words, the reaction to Ader’s tears may not be a straightforward registration of his sadness. His humorous note about this work – ‘I know a man ain’t supposed to cry’ – certainly indicates his cognisance of the general cultural aversion to the public display of male tears.50 To further complicate matters, because Ader’s film is without sound and lacks a context to establish the emotion on display, there is some ambiguity about the facial expressions that are shown, despite the ever-present tears. Under these circumstances, and with the obvious theatrics of Ader’s tears, a level of scepticism is encouraged about what is shown, so that momentarily the distortions and contortions of his facial expressions could be read as laughter rather than distress. To again invoke the work of Silvan Tomkins, while he states that the face is the primary site of the affects, he also notes how difficult it is to interpret facial expressions in terms of a single affect. Affects are often registered in very quick succession, making it hard to ‘catch fleeting affect on the wing’, as Tomkins puts it.51 Ader’s decontextualized distress amplifies normal ambiguities, thereby attracting as much curious interest as empathy on the part of the viewer. One might conclude that his work purposefully puts into play the reflection on feeling inadvertently provoked by minimalist art that was discussed in chapter two. In other words, alongside the display of feeling and the audience’s visceral response to that display, there is thinking or reflection about feeling. For instance, Ader’s work provokes innumerable questions: Is this real or simulated emotion? Are they real tears? Is he laughing or crying? There is none of this knowing detachment or irony in Mendieta’s Silueta Series, despite a similar combination of expressive and non-expressive qualities. Restraint mutes the affective tone of the series, which enables conformity to the non-expressive protocols of established conceptual-art practices, but the muting is not an ironic gesture or a type of cancelling out. The restraint could be characterized as ‘affect miniaturization’. Coined by Silvan Tomkins, affect miniaturization describes one of the mechanisms by means of which the expression of affect is made invisible or at least attenuated. He notes that

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much of our early training around the expression of feeling is about suppressing the broadcasting capacity of the body. He compares how we learn to not show or betray our emotions with our much more limited capacity to exercise any control over actually experiencing them.52 Miniaturization of feeling is one method of control that involves our experience of affect. It changes what Tomkins calls the ‘innate, complex organization of the affective response’. Affect, he says, ‘is further and further compressed almost to the point of invisibility to both the observer and to the one experiencing the affect’.53 He contrasts the cultural norms that would encourage more or less visible emotional displays – English restraint versus Italian flamboyance being just one easily recognized instance of smaller or more expansive displays of emotion.54 In terms of art practice, making the signs of affect smaller, more finegrained or substantially subtler, is distinct from the kind of reflection on feeling made possible by minimalist art. In minimalist art the attempt to withdraw feeling led to a proliferation of feeling, whereas compressed feeling is easy to overlook, even if very subtle indicators are present. The presence of such indicators is presumably apprehended at some level or else there would be the variable responses that are inevitably provoked by withdrawal. Compression or miniaturization of affect, when considered part of artistic expression, can refer to the various mechanisms of attenuation, restraint or containment of affect. In the case of Mendieta there are a number of modes of miniaturization. First and foremost there is the use of conceptual strategies that work against a highly expressionistic display of feeling. Then, at the level of subject matter, there is the minimization of the human form through the silhouette: even when the body is shown, little of the face and facial expression is evident. The figurative nature of the work, the ever-present depiction of the body, facilitates identification, but the suppression of detail keeps this within limits. Our tendency to focus on the human figure is thus engaged and subtly contained. The austere beauty of pared-back conceptual practice is another precisely balanced combination of allure and restraint. Beauty, used in this carefully calibrated fashion, elicits interest in the images and what they depict, but contains the powerful ideas of transience, mortality and disintegration that the series also calls up. This consequence of beauty, its ‘aestheticizing’ power if you will, is one of the most consistent ways in which affect is both expressed and yet contained or compressed. Beauty is like a Midas touch that renders all manner of difficult material interesting, while seemingly reducing the negative affects of distress, anger and so forth.

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There are, of course, compelling critiques of precisely this function. One of the most frequently cited is Walter Benjamin’s claim that photography can turn even ‘abject poverty, by recording it in a fashionably perfected manner, into an object of enjoyment’.55 Enjoyment, in the form of a feeling of pleasure, is the typical response attributed to the apprehension of beauty by classical aesthetics.56 Benjamin’s response follows that tradition by emphasizing the arousal of positive affect, however the implication is that enjoyment is in the place of a more appropriate feeling, such as distress. In other words, a positive affect displaces a negative one. While the particular example cited by Benjamin – enjoying images of poverty – may breach the ethical parameters of depiction and reception, the mechanism of displacement he highlights is crucial for understanding how the attenuation or reduction of affect works in other instances. That enjoyment results from the reduction of negative affect is consistently noted by Silvan Tomkins; ‘the smile of joy’, he observes, follows from the reduction of fear, distress and shame.57 This somewhat counter-intuitive model, where pleasure or enjoyment results from the reduction of stimulation rather than the addition of stimulation, is also followed by Freud’s model of pleasure in the second psychical topography. In the ‘The ego and the id’ he states that ‘sensations of a pleasurable nature have not anything impelling about them, whereas unpleasurable ones have it in the highest degree’.58 He continues: ‘The latter impel towards change, towards discharge, and that is why we interpret unpleasure as implying a heightening and pleasure a lowering of energetic cathexis.’59 In debates about beauty and its positive and negative qualities, the containment or reduction of distress and other negative affects has largely been ignored or dismissed. The soothing aspect of beauty, its role in generating interest and sympathy in disturbing subjects, is occluded by the consistent assumption that it is diametrically opposed to pain and the realities of political or social concerns.60 In light of this assumption, the most successful attempts to rectify the consistent denigration of beauty as mere superficial seduction have tended to focus on its relationship to knowledge, rather than feeling. For example, Elaine Scarry aligns beauty with the quest for truth by showing how mistakes about beauty are memorable events that teach us about both conviction and the possibility of error. Instead of being aligned with falsehood, she concludes, ‘our very aspiration for truth is its legacy.’61 Her argument serves to soften the sharp division presumed to separate beauty from worthy moral concerns, a divide that often underpins the anti-aesthetic

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stance. The opposition to aesthetic concerns, such as beauty, often flows from the presumption that they generate feeling but play no role in thinking and understanding. The criticism of traditional aesthetics made by the conceptual artist Allan Sekula is fairly typical of this attitude. He argues: ‘The subjective aspect of liberal aesthetics is compassion rather than collective struggle. Pity, mediated by an appreciation of “great art”, supplants political understanding.’62 The assumption here is that there is a strict division between thinking and feeling governed by immutable either/or logic. But does this logic invariably operate? Or, indeed, is the presence of feeling in the apprehension of art usually so overwhelming that understanding is supplanted? Certainly if we consider Mendieta’s work, the feelings of loss, melancholy or fear evoked by images suggestive of disintegration and disappearance are tempered by the formal means: the immaculately constructed or drawn silhouettes, the careful framing of those figures in the well-chosen sites, the balanced compositions, the range of colours and textures. In this way the ideas are conveyed through a slow-release mechanism and the formal means have a kind of mild anaesthetic effect: pleasure, interest and enjoyment frame and temper the visceral and the haunting images of dissolution and vulnerable, transient existence. Beauty, in this instance, is not incompatible with antiaesthetic conceptual methods, rather it is another way of containing exuberant expressivity while registering more restrained and carefully calibrated feeling. The combination of a traditional aesthetic attribute, such as beauty, with anti-aesthetic conceptual methods enables the Silueta Series to be simultaneously expressive, insofar as the series engenders feeling, and yet nonexpressive in that the work does indeed favour conceptual-art protocols that ‘privileged art-as-activity over art-as-product and documentary evidence over expression’, to recall Nancy Spector’s categorization of photographic practice in conceptual art.63 The incorporation of Mendieta’s work as part of conceptual art’s use of photography certainly honours the aspect of her practice that correlates with the generalized shift away from a concern with media-specificity, the leitmotif of conceptual art’s Duchampian heritage. What this newly found consonance diminishes, however, is the challenge posed by women’s body-centred and performance-oriented art to the more typical anti-expressive account of the 1960s and 1970s. Benjamin Buchloh has drawn attention to the consistent omission in the histories of the 1960s and 1970s, his own included, of women’s body-based practices. He argues that insufficient attention has been paid to how these practices operate as ‘counter-activities’ to the main practices art history has used to characterize the period.64

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Buchloh’s comments return us to Mendieta’s particular approach to the counter-activity this book charts, namely the affective dimension of her work. Her particular mode of presenting and containing powerful and unsettling ideas, her aesthetic restraint coupled with the mild anaesthetic of beauty, allows the generation of fellow feeling and identification while also muting those unsettling ideas. Mendieta’s use of the/her body, in abstracted and carefully contrived forms, facilitates recognition, interest and pleasure. But the threats to the figures’ existence, coupled with her use of mild disorientation, also make the viewer mildly apprehensive and uneasy. This complicated combination makes possible not only her depiction of the ambivalence of emotional ties, but also a substantial reworking of the capacities of conceptual-art language. Mendieta’s method of stirring up, yet quelling and containing, affect is an astounding achievement with such simple yet sensual means. Her images are thus both straightforward and memorable yet deeply bewildering – the final contrast I will add to the inventory this chapter has charted.

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6

The Dream of the Audience: The Moving Images of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

If we recall that one’s unconscious does not wholly belong to the individual, we might grasp Cha’s approach. Her use of language and images evokes a sense of impersonality, because they seem not to derive from or pertain to a knowable individual subject with whom we may readily identify. Yet from within this disorder or mystery, we experience her writing and art as powerfully resonant. Juliana Chang1

In the course of tracking the rejection of expressivity I have touched upon the idea of impersonality several times. This idea has arisen most explicitly in chapter two in the discussion of the anti-psychological tenor of much late modern art, and again as one of the specific aims of the serial method examined in chapter five. In this chapter, on the work of Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, impersonality is transformed from a desire to efface the subjectivity of the artist to a moving address to the audience. Impersonality is thereby linked, on the one hand, to an ethics of reception, and on the other to the shared dimension of the unconscious, as Juliana Chang’s comments above indicate. Linking impersonality to considerations of reception describes this shift in sensibility in terms of what it achieves rather than what it eschews. One could say an ethic of impersonality is prevalent in late modern art; that is, artists in this period frequently expressed a concern with the audience and reception, as well as an awareness of the interpretative horizons within which their work might be read. In other words, such art is other-oriented, rather than conceived as being solely about the expression of the self. 116

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This orientation towards the other with a large measure of self-forgetfulness is the central feature of the ethics of Emmanuel Levinas. 2 His predominantly uni-directional ethics takes most account of our obligations to the other, considered as the one in need. His aim is to make ethics foundational, ‘ethics as first philosophy’ as he puts it, and to thereby stress the importance and primacy of intersubjective relations over philosophies centred on the singular subject.3 That this negation of the self might also constitute an accomplishment in art making, rather than simply challenging established aesthetic traditions, is acknowledged by Yve-Alain Bois. The title of his recent lecture underscores the effort of self-effacement: ‘The difficult task of erasing oneself: non-composition in twentieth-century art.’4 Bois notes that from Seurat onwards there is a recurrent thread in modern art that he calls an ‘impersonal urge’, which at times is articulated as a desire for complete objectivity and the elimination of subjectivity. When oriented towards absolute self-effacement, each effort is bound to fail, as indeed Bois emphasizes and as we have already observed in chapter two. The impulse in such instances is driven by an impossible quest for complete negation. However, when impersonality results from an orientation towards the other, the result is quite different. In Cha’s art impersonality is part of the incidental tone of the work rather than an end in itself. She articulates her orientation towards the other in a very particular way. Of one of her performances she said: ‘In this piece, I want to be the dream of the audience.’5 This extraordinary sentence appears in an artist’s statement alongside the title of the work, A Ble Wail. The phrase is not explained; it operates as a heading followed by her description of the work. The unusual locution – ‘I want to be the dream of the audience’ – is enormously suggestive; two displacements or substitutions constitute the impersonal mode here – a person rather than a scene or scenario is being posited as a dream – and the audience’s dream, not the artist’s, is the subject of the work. Or, to follow her desire more closely, she wants to be nothing more than the dream or screen for the other’s thoughts and fantasies. The motif of the dream is very important for Cha’s time-based work and this theme will be explored in the final section of this chapter, which closely examines one of her key video installations, Passages, Paysages (1978). This installation is very moving, deriving its emotional resonance by putting her aim into practice and inducing a kind of dream-like state in the audience. While Cha’s work conforms to both the aesthetics and the ethics of impersonality, it also illuminates what might be regarded as personal concerns,

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namely the experience of cultural displacement (she left her native Korea in 1963 aged 12) and her existence between, or better still across, several languages – Korean, English and French. Her experience of displacement makes her receptive to the theoretical issues in French Freudianism, such as the displacement of the subject in and by language, the instability of language itself, and the way in which the entry into language creates a residue or incommunicable core at the heart of experience. These issues underpin the way in which Cha uses language in her films and videos. Her work thereby perfectly demonstrates what Jean-François Lyotard has called the high-modernist concern with representing the unrepresentable (his reworking of the meaning of the sublime).6 At first glance, Cha’s positioning in relation to the sublime might seem at variance with her clear adherence to a restrained impersonal mode of address. Her capacity to combine sublimity with a kind of detachment, however, is one of her great achievements. In the following sections I examine how her practice is simultaneously part of what has been called the ‘deflationary impulse’ in late modern and postmodern art, while also able to be understood through the reinvigorated idea of the sublime supplied by Lyotard. As an artist whose exhibiting career begins in the late 1970s, Cha’s work sits on the cusp between late-modernism and postmodernism. The bridge between these two periods is a continued adherence to the rejection of authorship and self-expression (at least on the part of those artists classified as critical postmodernists). The first section of this chapter will examine the continuation of the anti-aesthetic idea under other guises: the deflationary impulse of feminist art in the 1970s and 1980s and the embrace of Brechtian ideas of alienation in film theory in the same period. Cha’s films and videos fit as surely into these ways of thinking as they also extend that anti-aesthetic repertoire to include an affective dimension.

1

p o s t m o d e r n d e f l a t i o n a n d B r e c h t i a n a li e n a t i o n

The antinomies that characterize Cha’s work – such as adherence to Lyotard’s idea of the sublime as well as feminist anti-aesthetic practices – are very astutely contrasted by Margaret Iversen in her discussion of postmodernism. Iversen argues that feminist artists of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Mary Kelly, are indebted to the anti-aesthetic practices of minimalism and aligned with that sensibility. She is highly critical of the return of the sublime promoted by

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Lyotard, which had a high level of currency in the Anglophone art discourses of the early 1980s. According to her view, Lyotard’s reinvigoration of the sublime is completely opposed to what she aptly terms the ‘deflationary impulse’ that unites minimalism and feminist art.7 Iversen casts the sublime as a return of heroic (masculine) modernism, noting how Lyotard’s account excludes the work of women artists. In this context, anti-expressive, deliberately impersonal art is presented as an antidote, or deflation, of romantic notions of the (male) artist as an inspired, special person and the idea that art is an expression of that unique personality, and yet also transcendent or separate from mundane reality. Iversen associates Lyotard’s theories of the sublime, and his advocacy for the work of Barnett Newman, with the opposite of deflation – that is, the sublime for her is part and parcel of a general return to the conservative aesthetic ideas of the 1950s, such as artistic autonomy and transcendence. She concludes: ‘feminist art practice of any persuasion has little use for this revival of 50s sensibility.’8 The prime targets of the deflationary impulse are various forms of expressionism and certain kinds of formalist criticism that argue for the instant (if not universal) recognition of artistic quality.9 Expressionism is now shorthand for a type of romanticism about the artist’s capacity to depict unmediated inner feeling, as attacks on neo-expressionism in the 1980s testify.10 Virulent critiques of this art of pure personality can be found well before this period in writings by both critics and artists. A particularly vivid example of the latter is provided by Yves Klein’s bitter tirade against the expressionist tendencies of art informel that dominated the French art scene in the early 1950s: I despise artists who empty themselves out onto their paintings, as is often the case today. How morbid! Instead of thinking about the beautiful, the good, the true, they vomit, they ejaculate, they spit out all their horrible, rotten infectious complexity onto their painting as if to relieve themselves and weigh down ‘the others’, ‘the viewers’ of the work, with all the burden of their remorseful bitterness and failure.11

Klein’s spleen paints a picture of a worthy target for deflation. The reference to the burden carried by the audience is a particularly acute observation. The unpalatable accompaniment to this idea of the artist as a special person of ‘complexity’ is the critic as special person with correct taste by dint of class position and the necessary protection from the impingements of reality. Iversen cites T. J. Clark’s neat summary of this assumption: ‘The bourgeoisie

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has a small but considerable interest, I believe, in preserving a certain myth of the aesthetic consciousness, one where a transcendental ego is given something appropriate to contemplate in a situation essentially detached from the pressures and deformities of history.’12 It is often assumed that this description equates with a Kantian aesthetic subject, one who is disinterested and therefore detached from others and the world around them. On the contrary, in Kant’s aesthetics one finds the antidote to bourgeois self-absorption and individualism: judgments of taste are expected to take place within the imagined horizon of others’ judgments. While judgments of taste are first and foremost subjective in Kant’s aesthetics, they are described as having subjective universality only when they are impelled by a strong conviction that the judgment and attendant feelings of pleasure or displeasure are shared. Kant describes this at one point as a kind of obligation: ‘he judges not just for himself but for everyone.’13 For Kant, however, the central problem, or antinomy, of taste is that we act as if everyone should agree with our taste (universal voice), despite the fact that we also know there can be no agreement about taste as it is not based upon concepts. As he says: ‘the universal voice is only an idea.’14 It is, then, this ideal of the ‘universal voice’ that is at the heart of judgment, not some facile assumption of its attainability. It is something like this ideal of shared communication of both ideas and feelings that guides the practice of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. In other words, an ethics of impersonality takes this intersubjective ideal into account at the level of production. It is around the communication of feeling, however, that Cha’s work most obviously departs from the common understandings of impersonality in art. Impersonality is usually understood to mean an absence of feeling; the touchstone for this account is of course Marcel Duchamp’s famous declaration, discussed in chapter two, that his selection of the urinal for his infamous ‘readymade’ work of art: ‘was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anesthesia.’15 Similar sentiments have been traced in the previous chapters, particularly in the literature about minimalism and conceptual art, which are routinely interpreted as further entrenching this deflationary impulse and its rejection of feeling. As Sol LeWitt so succinctly put it, conceptual art addresses ‘the mind rather than the eye or the emotions.’16 A similar anti-psychological impulse informed the film theory of the 1970s developed by the group of writers involved with the British journal Screen. In that case, the work of Bertolt Brecht was crucial; in particular,

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his idea of distancing the audience through what he termed the ‘alienation effect’, which rejects crude empathy. This idea is crystallized for feminist film theory in the work of Laura Mulvey and her seminal critique of identification in film. The rejection of visual pleasure she outlines reiterates the anti-retinal, anti-expressive tendencies in structural film, minimal and conceptual art.17 The strong case against visual pleasure mounted by Mulvey has been much discussed, as has the effect of the particular version of Brechtian theory utilized in the 1970s. In 1982, for example, Griselda Pollock contributed a more nuanced account of feminist uses of visual pleasure, indicating that passive absorption was not the only source of viewing pleasure. She argued that feminist artists opposed conventional regimes of pleasure, but promulgated what she termed ‘emancipatory pleasures’.18 These included: ‘the possibilities of new pleasures in deconstruction, in producing new knowledge, in appreciating the significance of representation itself, in offering new patterns of identification for women spectators.’19 Similarly, in 1981 Sylvia Harvey noted that in the European reception of Brecht in the 1970s, his ideas about pleasure and lightness of touch were ignored.20 What has also escaped close scrutiny is Brecht’s attitude to emotion. Crucially, Brecht distinguished between the rejection of empathy and the rejection of emotions. As he put it: ‘The rejection of empathy is not the result of a rejection of the emotions, nor does it lead to such. The crude aesthetic thesis that emotions can only be stimulated by means of empathy is wrong.’21 However, he does caution that ‘none the less a non-aristotelian dramaturgy has to apply a cautious criticism to the emotions which it aims at and incorporates.’22 Brecht refers to empathy as a feature of Artistotelian drama where the spectator is ‘entangled’ or identified with the characters and ‘carried away’ or ‘hypnotized’ by the drama or actions which entrance.23 Empathy, then, entails the kind of incorporation of the other commonly associated with psychoanalytic concepts of identification, the colloquial form of which would be ‘putting oneself in the other’s shoes’. In other words, an unthinking usurpation or assimilation of the position of the other takes place premised on a recognition or construction of sameness. Cha’s work, as we shall see shortly, has a mesmerizing trance-like quality but does not facilitate or elicit crude empathy. Brecht’s separation of empathy and feeling is precisely the kind of nuanced reconsideration of feeling that will help us to situate the work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in relation to the anti-aesthetic tradition.

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2 b e t we e n c o n c e p t u a l a r t a n d p o s t m o d e r n d e mys t i f i c a t i o n Cha is a difficult artist to place in the current art-historical periodizations. Her practice spans object-making, postal art, performance, video, film and experimental fiction. To date, it is her experimental novel Dictée (1982) that has received the most attention.24 In the visual arts she has been recuperated for the expanded account of conceptualism initiated by the exhibition Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, and her work usually features in the San Francisco Bay-area accounts of conceptual art, the stop and start dates of which are later than the orthodox East Coast accounts. These West Coast accounts of conceptual art tend to integrate performance into conceptual art, in marked contrast to East Coast accounts where body-based practices are most often studied separately.25 Lawrence Rinder notes that San Francisco Bay-area conceptualism of the 1970s also ‘tended to invest conceptual forms with personal and physical qualities’.26 Viewing Cha’s work as part of the history of conceptual art correlates with her stated claims about the central role of language in her work. She said: ‘The main body of my work is with language, “looking for the roots of language before it is born on the tip of the tongue” ’.27 Her investigations of language, however, are guided by semiotics and psychoanalysis, rather than the Anglo-American analytic philosophy that informed the work of other conceptual artists such as Joseph Kosuth and the British Art & Language group.28 Semiotics, rather than analytic philosophy, also informed the work of the conceptual-art group known as Photography and Language, which Rinder notes was also part of Cha’s immediate Bay-area context.29 Born in 1951, Cha is slightly younger than the other women artists with a feminist inclination who have been rescued for the history of women’s contribution to conceptual art. Most of these women were born in the 1930s and 1940s – for example, Joan Jonas (b. 1936), Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934), Eleanor Antin (b. 1935), Mary Kelly (b. 1941) and Martha Rosler (b. 1943). Adrian Piper, who was born in 1948, is Cha’s closest contemporary. While Piper is now fairly consistently recuperated for the history of conceptual art, Cha is not. Cha’s premature death at the age of 31, just as her work was becoming more widely known and exhibited, would clearly be a contributing factor to her reputation and renown. In terms of art-historical positioning, Cha could also be aligned with the desire to destabilize or demystify traditional accounts of subjectivity, like

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Mary Kelly, Eleanor Antin and Martha Rosler – artists who are often also situated in relation to feminist-postmodernist practice. Cha’s video installation Passages, Paysages, which I will discuss in greater detail shortly, was included in the seminal exhibition Difference: On Representation and Sexuality at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, in 1985. This exhibition, which included the work of Barbara Kruger, Mary Kelly, Martha Rosler, Sherrie Levine and Silvia Kolbowski, is often presented as signalling a shift in feminist art towards a postmodern approach to identity. The curator, Kate Linker, puts forward the now familiar case for regarding identity as ‘a cultural construction’ rather than a ‘biological truth’, and hence able to be changed and challenged.30 While Cha’s work can be included in this shift, her manner of destabilizing identity owes little to the deconstructive strategy commonly deployed for this purpose, which as Abigail Solomon-Godeau notes tended to focus on representation itself.31 The work of Barbara Kruger and Martha Rosler perfectly exemplifies this strategy: their art unpicks cultural conventions, on occasions through humour, making a mockery of patriarchal social and cultural systems. For example, Kruger reworks advertisers’ favourite shifter ‘you’ in her striking images with titles such as: You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men or It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it. These kinds of images also perfectly exemplify Brecht’s alienation effect: they draw attention to gender stereotypes through a process of defamilarization. For example, in You construct intricate rituals some kind of male roughhousing is depicted with a group of men shown joined together as if in a rugby scrum. The title eroticizes this touching, which is made all the more absurd by the participants’ elaborate dinner dress. Martha Rosler’s 1977 film, Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained, similarly mocks patriarchal systems – in this case, the classification of the female body. The film shows a team of white-coated scientists measuring Rosler’s body, pronouncing parts of it standard, above standard and so forth to the sound of a whistle and other fairly ridiculous aural accompaniments. In the work of both artists, humour coupled with defamiliarization sets the viewer apart from the thing viewed in a critical and decidedly non-collusive position.32 The postmodern subject portrayed is very definitely decentred, shown to be ‘an “effect of language”, a precipitate of the very symbolic order of which the humanist subject supposed itself to be the master’, to use Victor Burgin’s description of the subjectivity that results when the effect of the social or cultural system is made paramount.33

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Cha’s work, by comparison, indicates a close allegiance to what has been called postmodern theory, rather than postmodern art strategies; that is, Lacanian psychoanalysis and its investigations in French film theory. Cha first became acquainted with these ideas as an undergraduate student at Berkeley where she studied semiotics and film theory with Bertrand Augst. In 1976 she studied with some of the key figures in French film theory – Jean-Louis Baudry, Christian Metz, Raymond Bellour, Thierry Kuntzel – at the Centre d’Etude Américain du Cinéma in Paris. In that same year she refers specifically to her desire to put this theory into practice in actual works: her term is the ‘ “realization” of the theory in practice’.34 Cha’s advocacy of these ideas is also indicated by her edited collection, Apparatus. Cha is well known in film theory circles as the editor of this important collection of essays on apparatus theory published in 1980, which introduced many English speakers to this area of French film theory.35 What could be said to distinguish Cha’s practice from the more common deconstructive approach to identity is that she creates an experience of the decentred subject, rather than making work about it. That is, her work conveys a strong sense of being disoriented by language as well as being interpellated by it. And it is this disorientation, this experience of language that exceeds meaning, which recalls Lyotard’s notion of the sublime. There is an abiding sense in Cha’s work of experience that cannot be put into words that is nonetheless conveyed by words. In relation to Cha’s novel Dictée, Min Jung Lee has called this a commitment to communicating the ‘untransmitted, whether it is the translation of one culture to another, one telling of history to another or one media to another.’36 This description highlights the way in which Lyotard’s sublime has pertinence for thinking about cross-cultural representation. Indeed, thinking about the unrepresentable as operating between and within cultures broadens how we might think about the limits of reason that both aesthetics and psychoanalysis address. In a sense, both psychoanalysis and aesthetics are interested in the failures of reason. Psychoanalysis is attuned to the eruption of primary unconscious processes in secondary processes; that is, what the subject wishes but does not intend to say. Similarly, aesthetics addresses not just the transcendental subject and its purported freedom but also its limits. Lyotard’s reinterpretation of Kant makes this explicit. For Lyotard, avant-garde art is the exploration of the limits of thought. Lyotard transforms Kant’s sublime from the exhibition of an indeterminate concept of reason to the stronger claim that the aim of avant-garde art is to investigate what is not demonstrable, and to bear ‘witness to the inexpressible’.37

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There are aspects of Kant’s two accounts of the sublime that are especially useful for interpreting Cha’s work. First, in his account of the mathematical sublime, there is a description of the failure of imagination in its synthesizing capacity – imagination strives to put perceptions together, expands to its limit and then falls back on itself and, rather than feeling defeated, it experiences a ‘liking’ that is an emotion.38 The dynamic sublime similarly charts the finding of courage in the face of the threat of nature; it has a peculiarly moral role in that it is supposed to assure us that we could similarly retain our moral principles in the face of an overwhelming threat.39 In a sense, both accounts counsel openness to what exceeds, overwhelms or frightens and provide a guide for attitudes to otherness. The idea that these kinds of experiences, which push past our capacities or experiences, can be pleasurable is something that is particularly pertinent to Cha’s video work.

3

Pa s s a g e s , Pay s a g e s

In her brief exhibiting career, Cha made two extraordinarily fine, moving and engrossing video installations: Exilée (1980), which combines film and video, with the video nested inside the film projection, and Passages, Paysages (1978), a three-monitor video installation of approximately 11 minutes duration. Both combine complex poetic texts interwoven with exquisite images to create carefully edited and layered visual and aural sequences. Both deserve extended analysis to fully appreciate the intelligence and subtlety of their construction; here I shall concentrate on Passages, Paysages. Passages was first exhibited in Cha’s MFA show of 1978 at the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley. The following year it was shown at the San Francisco Institute of Art. Both venues were important for fostering conceptual art in the San Francisco Bay area. The title, Passages, Paysages, with its almost homonym-like doubling, signals the play with language and with similarity and difference that are the hallmarks of this work. The instability of language is already evident in the title: the second unambiguously French word meaning landscapes, ‘paysages’, retroacts on the first word, ‘passages’, casting its Englishness into doubt. The opening sequence on the left-hand monitor reinforces this capacity for transformation; a lap dissolve takes us from the word ‘Passages’ to ‘Paysages’: with the change of one letter we move from one word to another, possibly one language to another.

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This movement between languages is also evident in two early singlemonitor video works, Vidéoème (1976, b&w, sound, 4 min 30 sec) and Re Dis Appearing (1977, b&w, sound, 2 min 20 sec). Both works were made during Cha’s decade of study at the University of California, Berkeley (1968–78), during which time she completed two bachelor degrees and two masters degrees. Re Dis Appearing was first screened for Cha’s MA exhibition at the Worth Ryder Gallery, University of California, Berkeley in 1977 and was later shown in Australia in 1979 as part of the exhibition Videotapes by Women from the Los Angeles Women’s Video Center at the Ewing and George Paton Gallery in Melbourne. In Re Dis Appearing the voice-over overlaps and intertwines French and English words – ‘un bol de thé, a bowl of tea, tea bowl’ – which in turn sometimes describes objects shown in the video and at other times takes a more poetic turn – ‘thé au sommeil, tea of sleep’ (Fig. 20). Vidéoème – a video poem about the word itself – works with the etymology of the word ‘video’ (from the Latin videre, ‘to see’, with an added ‘o’ to match the word ‘audio’), as well as bringing to bear the further associations when the

20 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Re Dis Appearing, 1977 video still, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

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word is considered in French. The short video is constructed of white words on a black background and uses dissolves and fades to black between shots. The soundtrack consists of single words spoken in English. As Lawrence Rinder notes, Cha builds up the word vidéoème from smaller words: ‘vidé’ (French for emptied), ‘vidé o’ (emptied + zero and video) and then ‘o ème’ (very least).40 The English associations from the Latin and French are then rendered: the word ‘sound’ appears in white on black, then ‘see,’ then the word ‘empty’ appears, contrasted visually and aurally with the word ‘see’. Rinder has pointed out that Cha’s method of creating neologisms is very close to Freud’s account of invented or overlapping words in his discussion of jokes and their relation to the unconscious.41 In his book on jokes Freud transposes terms he previously used to describe the ways in which unconscious ideas are concealed in dreams. Vidéoème uses two of the psychic mechanisms that, according to Freud, are more often deployed to disguise unconscious wishes or ideas: condensation and displacement. Condensation literally condenses two or more words and ideas; for example, vidéoème is formed from video + poem. Displacement, on the other hand, represents a kind of diversion, usually of affect to another less potent idea, but it can also describe the associational axis that works through contiguity, hence the chain of associations: vidé, empty, zero and so forth. In Vidéoème we can see very clearly the work of condensation; the extent of the harboured words is expanded by having recourse to two languages. And this recourse to two languages facilitates displacement as the uncovered French word ‘vidé’ allows a completely different avenue of unnoticed or unintended meaning to open up. This way of working with language is characterized by Freud in his account of jokes as giving free play to the unconscious modes of thought, namely primary process thinking where language becomes polysemic, slippery and associational in contrast to secondary processes which are more typical of everyday language and logic.42 In jokes, unlike dreams, these mechanisms are deployed for amusement, but the joke, nonetheless, liberates this doubled and dense mode of thinking characteristic of the unconscious. Lacan calls this unconscious, underlying stratum of language, lalangue. This neologism, which telescopes the French feminine definite article ‘la’ with the word for tongue ‘langue,’ is described by Russell Griggs as a stutter, a fracturing of language that exceeds and disrupts communication.43 It is this non-communicational aspect of language that Cha identifies as central to her work. She states: ‘As a foreigner, learning a new language extended beyond its basic function of communication, as it is generally for a native speaker, to consciously imposed

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detachment that allowed analysis and experimentation with other relationships of language.’44 The sliding of language, or ramifying of its associations, is also a feature of the way in which Cha uses images in Passages, Paysages. Like Chris Marker’s comment that for him the image is the Proustian madeleine of film, Cha uses images to evoke associations in the viewer.45 She explained that: ‘The images and language emerge from sources that are highly personal in that they are accounts from memory. These given instances in time attempt as catalysts to evoke other moments in the viewer’s memory, that bridges the viewer and myself in dialogue.’46 The highly personal memory is presumed to be able to touch the viewer, to provoke their associations. The personally significant is thereby not presented as something particular or meaningful only to the artist. Here we see the traces of Kant’s ideal of the universal voice; Cha assumes the charge of highly personal memories is communicable. Such an affective charge, like Marker’s Proustian madeleine, sets off associations and reminiscences in the viewer. Marker was one of many film-makers who influenced Cha’s practice. The visual track of the video is largely comprised of black-and-white still images, apart from a small section of Super-8 film shown on the central monitor at the very beginning, which spells out the title of the work letter by letter. Movement occurs only between the frozen moments of the shots, and across the monitors as images migrate left and right. These movements and migrations of images, which are all quite slow and gradual, produce intensification through reduction, as though one becomes more acutely aware of what subsists of the moving image when it has been so deliberately minimized. The images include photographs, a painting, and French and English words handwritten and in typescript – which use all the possibilities of placement opened up by Mallarmé (another crucial influence). The photographic images are austere, beautiful, deliberately nostalgic and evocative. The images of words punctuate the visual track, dividing it very roughly into three sequences of images. The first sequence shows an empty bed with rumpled white sheets, followed by close-ups of pillows and sheets rendered abstract through raking light and deep shadows (Fig. 21). The second sequence is dominated by hands opening and closing (Fig. 22). The final sequence begins with bundles of letters, suggestive of an absent correspondent. A photograph of an empty room with a bay window further underscores the theme of absence. Other images in this sequence include a close-up of an Asian landscape

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21 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Passages, Paysages, 1978 video stills, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

22 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Passages, Paysages, 1978 video stills, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

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23 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Passages, Paysages, 1978 video stills, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

rendered in watercolour, a photograph of an Asian village and a photograph of a mother and child, presumably Cha and her mother (Fig. 23).47 Cha uses stills as a way of casting the time of the film in a kind of doubled past: the time of the images does not correlate with the time of the video recording or the time of the voiceover. Thus pointing not only to the lessons of structural film – the rejection of linear narrative, the refusal of illusion and attention to the materiality and temporality of film – but also to the theme of memory. Earlier works of Cha’s, such as the film Permutations (1976, 16 mm, b&w, silent, 11 min 20 sec) and the video Mouth to Mouth (1975, b&w, sound, 7 min 40 sec), are much more indebted to the methods of structural film. Permutations examines the flicker effect, one of the four characteristics of structural film identified by P. Adams Sitney.48 The film emphasizes the flickering of film, which is usually invisible, by quickly juxtaposing a series of photographs of Cha’s sister with her eyes opened and closed, and alternating sections of her facing forwards and backwards, with sections of white and black film (Fig. 24). The permutations of her sister’s positioning are increased

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24 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Permutations, 1976 film still, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

by the ghostly afterimages that appear on the blank film. In turn, the afterimages testify to the peculiar operation of persistence of vision, a facility that allows the stuttering or flickering stills, which make up the projected film, to appear to be continuous action. Mouth to Mouth takes the concerns of structural film with materiality across to video. It uses the aural and visual static of video in a similarly inventive way to the deployment of the vertical roll in Joan Jonas’ video of that name. Jonas registered each arrival of a rolling line at the bottom of the screen with a loud sound, as if the vertical roll was breaking against the limits of the monitor. The static in Cha’s work is similarly correlated with sound and vision. At times, the static looks like rainwater draining into the disembodied mouth enunciating Korean vowels in the centre of the screen (Fig. 25). This appearance is reinforced by the way in which the sound of the static merges with the sound of rain. With Passages one can see the effects of this apprenticeship, but also the emergence of Cha’s more nuanced and purposeful use of film history and theory to create her own idiom. For example, in Passages the reduction of filmic illusion to the shallow plane of the two-dimensional image does not

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25 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Mouth to Mouth, 1975 video still, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum. Courtesy of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

serve literalism; rather, each image wavers between presence and absence: that is, the frozen moments are set before us but the time of their making is not. The pastness of the images is thus emphasized rather than the film medium; and the camera is recast as an apparatus of memory, recalling or recollecting images rather than simply recording them. Cha was very conscious of the effects of using still images. Describing her use of projection in performance, she said: ‘A direct interaction with the audience in same space and time is achieved as well as uniting the spectator with the “Absent” where and the “Absent” when the images and words were first made.’49 The soundtrack intensifies the complicated sense of time conveyed by the still images; it deals, like Proust, with lost time, remembering and forgetting. The very first word of the voice-over is ‘gone’; this is then modified with ‘not yet, not gone not yet, a few remaining moments’. This is fairly typical of the voiceover; the speech is fragmentary, often incantatory, elliptical and recursive. We don’t know what is gone, and nor do we ever discover what remains or has gone. The temporal shifts are also marked here: past tense

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‘gone’, then future anterior ‘not yet gone’, then to the present – ‘a few remaining moments’. This shuffling of time puts the work almost into the realm of timelessness; language certainly does not provide a secure point of anchorage for the viewer. The voice-over constantly shifts tenses and persons; for example, ‘Remember just the other day, I’m closing my eyes, do you remember me closing my eyes the other day’. And: ‘I have forgotten, that is what she will say, that she has forgotten.’ This recursive undoing of what has been said creates not only a strong sense of the instability of meaning, but also shifts the listener/viewer into a dream-like space where such shifts and contradictions can, as it were, live peacefully. The untransmittable is thus not only an unnameable loss around which the work circulates, but also an excess of meaning that outstrips our perceptual capacities. This accommodation of the impossible is sustained by the reassuring rhythm of Cha’s voice-over, which is incantatory, distinct and measured, at once calming, almost lulling. And yet her tone is wistful, with a very slight edge of urgency. The timing of the image-track also has a reassuring slow rhythm: images change slowly, fades are used frequently to ease the transitions between shots, and there are many visual pauses comprised of blank sections of black and grey. These devices create continuity despite the fact that the images themselves are disconnected, suggestive fragments. Only at one point do the photographic images and soundtrack converge when a male voice begins ‘Dear Theresa,’ only to be shadowed by another voice speaking in French. On the image-track a bundle of letters appears. Two very precise dates are given: 31 July 1972 and 20 June 1974. Between these two is a snatch of dialogue saying ‘hardly let anyone out’. After the second date there are snatches of dialogue in Korean and then Korean music is played. The event between these dates may be the imposition of martial law in October 1972 in South Korea. The images certainly seem to shift after this point to more distinctly Asian images – the landscapes of the title, represented by both painting and photography. So historical moments, actual geographical locations and biographical elements are suggestively woven into the flux of word and image, registered as definite temporal and spatial anchorage points but not emphasized. In addition to the complex weaving of word and image, the work marshals and deploys the contrasts that are the basis of meaning – the pictorial means of light/dark, reiterated by the French words enteindre/allumer, past/present, remembered/forgotten, absence/presence. These contrasts are intertwined rather than obeying the law of mutual exclusion. Min Jung Lee has argued that it is in ‘the pause, in the silent middle between oppositions,

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that she [Cha] must form her subjecthood’.50 While in the literary discussions of Dictée there is an emphasis on her particular identity formation between cultures, in Passages what lies between the organizing oppositions of reason is the other scene where identity is undone. Certainly this is how her friend and contemporary Judith Barry presents Cha’s project. She describes Cha’s work as showing ‘how language structures the unconscious by destroying conventions about what constitutes her/our symbolic order, a radical reordering of not only her identity as Asian, as non-native anywhere – and her place in that identity as a woman, but which also deeply subverted notions about how time and space and light might produce meaning’.51 This undoing can be understood as a feminist action, such as we see in postmodern demystification practices. However, with Cha’s work there is a dream-like quality induced by the ramifying associations that makes undoing pleasurable and moving. In other words, rather than being made more conscious of our determinations by culture, or of the contingency of these constructions, Cha’s work makes us aware of our fundamental contingency, that our certainties about time, space and language are not the only reality. Or, to put it another way, her work mobilizes the features and processes at work in the dream and the other scene of the unconscious. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, her stated aim for one of her performances was to be ‘the dream of the audience’. This evocative phrase is an indication of the register of experience Cha aimed to emulate and to induce in her audience. The dream, of course, is also one of the key metaphors for the cinematic experience used by film theorists such as Jean-Louis Baudry. He argues that the film apparatus (by which he means the whole ensemble of human and mechanical elements that make the film experience possible) mimics the psychic apparatus during sleep: separation from the outside world, inhibition of mobility, a confusion of representation and perception.52 In Passages, Paysages there are other analogies with the psychoanalytic understanding of the dream that characterize the form of the videos themselves. For example, without a fixed point of enunciation, Passages, Paysages has the character Lacan describes as the impersonal form of the dream. According to the Lacan, a feature of all dreams is this strange sliding-away of the subject; that is, rather than the dreamer actively looking, it is the dream that ‘shows’.53 In other words, agency shifts away from the dreamer; he or she is displaced and pacified. The ethic of impersonality is thus doubly inscribed here. At the level of production, Cha cedes the role of the expressive subject to make way for the dream of the audience, and at the level of reception, the

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beholder is displaced by the impersonal dream-like form of the work. And the dreamer/viewer is pacified despite the fact that they are not able to synthesize or position themselves in relation to the complex temporal and spatial shifts of the work, because its dream-like quality brings with it the reduction of emotional intensity characteristic of the dream. In Passages the pervading feeling of melancholy is present, but attenuated or dissipated by the ramifying associations. Attenuation of feeling, rather than its absence, suggests another way of thinking about the anaesthetic sensibility. In many respects the work accords with the anaesthetic sensibility insofar as there is no clear place of anchorage or identification for the beholder. However, the beholder is not alienated by the work or made more conscious of it. One is not led to a more reflexive kind of viewing. The work is too complicated to facilitate that kind of mastery, rather its impersonal form allows feeling to be registered but contained. Viewing then is not traumatising, nor redemptive. Instead, it has the effect, as one critic put it, of suspending the beholder ‘between consciousness and unconsciousness’.54 This comment was made in an unpublished review of one of Cha’s performances, Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard (Ailleurs) (1978). According to Katherine Russell Bond the sentiment is typical of the extant reports about Cha’s performance work. Bond notes, in particular, that Cha’s work was referred to as having a mesmerizing quality. Cha’s close friend and colleague Yong Soon Min argued that this quality united her tapes, films and performances. Min said: ‘All of them have that quality – they sort of lower your blood pressure and put you into this very tranquil, meditative state of mind.’55 In Passages there is a sense of pleasurable reverie induced by the work as well as an abiding sense of loss, transience, passager, or fleeting beauty, to invoke the French word which seems to present itself as the third term of the title, that might unite the previous two. Cha’s work is thus able to demonstrate what is lost and gained by displacement. Without anchorage, the viewing subject is at once disoriented but also opened to another more associational relationship to words and images. Acuity about this mode of relating could be seen as the result of trauma, such as cultural displacement or exile, insofar as trauma reactivates the disorientation at the base of our contingent existence. In other words, Cha makes manifest the common psychoanalytic idea that subjectivity is founded upon trauma. For example, Jean Laplanche argues it is the trauma of the overwhelming enigmatic signifier (the premature message of parental desire)

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that precipitates the unconscious in order to metabolize it.56 Work like Cha’s, guided by the personal experience of what could be called ‘secondary’ trauma, makes apparent the founding trauma of subjectivity that is for the most part repressed and occluded. What her work communicates, however, is a highly unusual approach to traumatic experience, one that seeks to intertwine loss and gain, pleasure and pain. In aesthetics, this peculiar set of conjunctions, as we have already seen, goes by the name of the sublime. Cha’s work quite remarkably refigures how we might understand the meaning of the untransmittable or the unrepresentable, linking it to subjective concerns. In particular, she shows how an ethics of impersonality allows, and in fact enables, personal experience and feeling to be expressed in unconventional and nonautobiographical ways.

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Conclusion: Which Anthropomorphism?

When I set out on the great adventure of my art I dedicated myself to the creation of work utterly free of human associations. It is exactly the absurd impossibility of that quest which made my work possible. If I had known that it is impossible to make art devoid of human associations because the essence of art is human association, I never would have been able to do what I have done. Human beings, alas, are the one indispensable necessity for art. Carl Andre1 As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea. Michel Foucault 2 At the moment of speaking, I would like to have perceived a nameless voice, long preceding me, leaving me merely to enmesh myself in it, taking up its cadence, and to lodge myself, when no one was looking, in its interstices as if it had paused an instant, in suspense, to beckon me. There would have been no beginnings: instead speech would proceed 137

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from me, while I stood in its path – a slender gap – the point of its possible disappearance. Michel Foucault3

The desire for self-effacement or the wish to be free of human associations that unites certain artists and intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s is often understood to be a type of anti-humanism. Viewed in this way, the writings of philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida are frequently posed as useful to the cause of feminism because they question a certain type of autarchic human subject. In a similar vein, the deflationary impulse and the wholesale rejection of self-expression as an artistic mode is identified by Margaret Iversen as playing a facilitatory role for feminist artists in the 1970s and 1980s.4 That there is enormous value in the quest for the absolute, impersonality, detachment, objectivity – call it what you will – is beyond doubt. Such goals serve to redress the over-concentration on the expressive genius of the (male) artist, popular myths of creativity as divine inspiration, and the idea of the artist as an avatar of freedom, not subject to the constraints that pertain to other fields of endeavour. My goal in this book has not been to dispute the validity of the anti-aesthetic tradition but rather to nuance its achievements and in particular to acknowledge the contributions of women artists to the development of that aesthetic language. Most significantly, the art of Lygia Clark, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has infused that language with feeling and emotion. Viewing this tradition from the standpoint of these women artists, it becomes apparent that impersonality and expressivity are more closely intertwined than is commonly supposed. While in this period male artists committed to anti-aesthetic aims consistently presumed that expressivity could be combated with recourse to impersonality, in different ways the women artists in this book have assumed otherwise. In their hands, expression is transformed from being a singular possession of the artist – his or her personal inner feelings that may or may not be communicable – to being an aspect of art to be encountered and experienced by the beholder. The mode of this encounter varies from artist to artist. In each case, models of the subject can be deduced that extend upon the entanglement of work of art and beholder discussed in chapter one in relation to the anthropomorphism of minimalism. While entanglement remains a useful metaphor or model for considering the blurring of boundaries that the affective dimension of art achieves, the model of the subject posited by Thierry de Duve as the most pertinent for

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minimalism, the black box, is not applicable to the art practices this book has been tracking. The search for the most pertinent models, however, is guided by de Duve’s provocative statement that all art is anthropomorphic; the challenge is to identify which type of anthropomorphism is being employed.5 For him the question to pose to minimalism, or any art for that matter, is ‘which heuristic model of man does it propose?’6 This approach to art’s ‘human associations’ illuminates subjectivity in a way that is compatible with the main thrust of anti-aesthetic practices and yet accords with the innovations proposed by Clark, Hesse, Mendieta and Cha. To conclude, I want to consider those innovations and the kinds of entanglement entailed or opened up by them. The most literal entanglement of beholder and work of art is provided by the participatory propositions of Lygia Clark. Yve-Alain Bois argues that her entire oeuvre aims at the ‘disappearance of the author’.7 She thereby adheres to the questioning of the centrality of the artist’s subjectivity that is a consistent aim of anti-aesthetic practices. However, the eclipse of authorship is not intended to produce affectless ‘zombie art’, to use Max Kozloff ’s colourful expression. Rather, as Roland Barthes anticipated, the death of the author makes way for the reader or participant, who becomes a vital part of the aesthetic encounter in Clark’s work. Contrary to all expectations, the eclipse of authorship intensifies the expressive and affective dimension of art. Recent writings on participation have tended to align art participation with democratic principles, as though the requirement that the audience completes the work of art reflects ideals of active participation and inclusion in social and political processes.8 In Clark’s work, as we have seen, the subject who engages with her propositions is destabilized, unsettled, perhaps even disoriented, by the strange feelings and sensations that are evoked. The aim of such works is for the participant to experience the wild imaginings and feelings of the pre-social body, not to deliver the docile bodies that might be required for political involvement, democratic or otherwise. As she said, it is the ‘fantasmatics of the body, in fact, which interests me, and not the body in itself ’.9 Her art propositions are often made from the most prosaic everyday substances (paper, scissors, stones), yet they fight the dulled-down perceptions of alienated modern existence by upsetting routinized approaches to the senses. Using the affects of surprise, startle and claustral joy, she underscores the precarious, dependent and vulnerable nature of modern subjectivity and existence. Thus the exploration of subjectivity does not lead to a shoring-up of the self, rather the intensity of feeling and experience of vitality come with risks to coherence and sanity so well identified by Donald Winnicott.10

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Eva Hesse’s art achieves a different kind of alchemy with everyday materials. Works like, Untitled or Not Yet (1966), which featured prominently in the promotional material for her 2002–03 retrospective at the Tate Modern in London, bear a striking similarity to Lygia Clark’s netted objects of 1968– 69, or her relational objects from the last phase of her career (Fig. 26 and 27). In particular, there is the same sense of containment and weight. Clark used common netting from fruit and vegetable packaging. The participant– beholder might be enclosed in a large net weighted at the end with pebbles, or the netted stones might be suspended from the body. In her therapeutic work the patient would hold these objects. For Clark, visual appearance is perhaps less important than the sensations that the nets produce in contact with the body. For Hesse, the visual remains paramount – it must relay or translate other sensations. In Hesse, any interaction or participation with ideas of containment, weight or texture must take place only in the mind, as she insisted in relation to her works in the Accession series. Her exact instructions were: ‘I don’t ask that Accession be participated with other than in thought.’11 But both artists, and this is why the contrast is so remarkable, seem to be marshalling something that is not reducible to visibility. Clark’s word for this, as noted above, is ‘fantasmatic’, a term that covers the sense of experiencing something without a real or identifiable referent, such as her works consistently conjure. Both artists touch the beholder’s imagination; setting off a kind of fantasizing or imagining that is paradoxically strongly linked to its stimulus. The kinds of entanglement are, however, very different. In Hesse’s work there is a distance, alongside imaginative involvement, a separation that allows the work to be both experienced and metaphorically ‘taken in’. She spoke of her work’s underlying system, if it existed, as being closer to ‘soul or introspection, to inner feelings’.12 Both artists emphasize inwardness. Clark famously contrasts her interior propositions with the more socially-oriented work of her friend and compatriot Hélio Oiticica: ‘Hélio was like the outside of the glove, linked to the exterior world. I am the inside, and the two of us exist from the moment there is a hand which puts on the glove.’13 Hesse, on the other hand, retains a link to the literalness of minimalism, the hic et nunc of rootedness in real time and space, even as she extends that vocabulary through actively encouraging the kinds of associations literalism aimed to arrest or preclude. The comparison with minimalism helps to get at the kind of entanglement her work proposes and the subject so produced. If minimalism draws the spectator’s body into a self-reflective dialogue with

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26 Eva Hesse, Untitled or Not Yet, 1966 nets, polyethylene, paper, sand, cord 71 x 15 x 8 inches (variable) (180.3 x 39.4 x 21 cm), 9 units San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, purchased through a gift of Phyllis Wattis, 1997 © The Estate of Eva Hesse. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth

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27

Lygia Clark, Camisa-de-força (Straight Jacket), 1969

Photographer: unknown Courtesy of ‘The World of Lygia Clark’ Cultural Association

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the work of art, if it inscribes the self as pure exteriority, then the work of Hesse sets off an imaginative dialogue with the work of art, and produces a subject at once introspective and involved with their own associations but also present to the work and its curious otherness. Rather than Hesse’s artistic expression being private and obdurately unavailable, as Rosalind Krauss has argued, I have suggested that Hesse’s late sculptures resonate with the viewer’s unconscious. The capacity to attain such deep emotional resonance with the beholder is an extremely rare achievement in art practice and one of her greatest innovations. To introduce this kind of attunement to the ‘blackbox subject’ refigures interiority as complexity and contradiction. If Hesse and Clark can be considered to be a pair insofar as there is a shared sculptural engagement with questions of interiority and imagination, Cha and Mendieta form a contrasting pair around the use of lens-based media to examine the articulations of identity. The shift to include the word ‘identity’ signals the different debates around representation that begin to encompass these works in the 1970s. Of course, Hesse is also swept into these debates retrospectively, but the work of Mendieta and Cha coincides historically with these changing concerns about whether artists speak for women, of women, to women, and what they might have to say about intercultural identity and crosscultural positioning. These important issues have not been my concern in this book; they are, of course, very well canvassed elsewhere. In terms of my focus here, the refraction of the question of the subject through the lens of gender, race or ethnicity has the most bearing on the kinds of models of subjectivity that are offered by their practices. One can read both artists as offering feminist models of the subject, but ones that stand as different kinds of correctives. Mendieta’s work proposes a relational model of identity, which she explicitly identifies with ancient cultures very closely linked to nature. That such a model disrupts the idea of man’s sovereignty over nature, and the colonialist attitude to the native, is explicitly addressed by Mendieta. In two of her lectures, Mendieta links the domination of nature to the project of colonization: ‘To establish his empire over nature it has been necessary for man to dominate other men and to treat part of humanity as objects. This has had a detrimental effect on both man and nature.’14 In prehistoric beliefs about nature she seeks, then, an alternative to the appropriative masculinist relation to land, space and earth. Of her Silueta Series she says: ‘The work recalls prehistoric beliefs of an omnipresent female force whose body parts made the earth a living creature. In essence my works are the reactivation of primeval beliefs at work within the human psyche.’15 She resuscitates, then,

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a link between the female body and space, and its correlate, a belief in a maternal world. That such a model with its complicated spatial relations is a little disorienting is balanced by the beauty of the image, which acts as a counterforce of attraction. While Mendieta’s Silueta Series can be understood through the classical aesthetic category of beauty, I interpret Cha’s work using beauty’s traditional pendant – the sublime. Cha’s video installations are without doubt some of the best representations of the decentred subject. The term ‘decentred subject’ can have many meanings; Mendieta’s stress on the earth and the dependence upon nature is one version of the decentring or questioning of the autarchic subject. Cha’s complex video works, on the other hand, underscore the limits of our perception. It is the failure of the viewing subject to assimilate or master the complex mix of language and images that characterizes her later video works, and which delivers the gentle pleasure in the stretching and falling short of our imagination. Representation is not shown here as part of the cultural construction of human subjects, in the sense of moulding who we are through assimilated sets of idea, beliefs and behaviours. It is overwhelming, both a source of communication and confusion. The subject decentred by this approach to representation cannot point to particular ideas that have made them who they are, nor attempt to demystify subjectivity or subjective traits imposed from outside. Rather, the language of the unconscious threatens to derail and undo subjectivity in ways that are hard to pinpoint, let alone control. The sense of dreamy pleasure and wistful reverie that Cha marshals softens the challenge to sovereignty. Like Mendieta’s Siluetas, there is an aesthetic containment of what could otherwise be overwhelming. All four artists are within a hair’s breadth of overwhelming ideas and sensations; it is their astonishing capacity to conjure such strong feelings, while also providing the assurance of containment or constraint, that I hope I have been able to evoke. One final word should be said on feminist method. I began this project because I felt there was a need to consider the seminal moment of the 1960s and 1970s from the point of view of women artists. As no doubt many readers will be aware, there is consistent registration, in word and in deed, of the centrality of minimalism and conceptualism to understandings of not only the 1960s and 1970s but also the latter half of the twentieth century. In addition, these movements are regarded as touchstones for evaluating which types of contemporary art count as advanced practices.16 To admit the particular challenges and contributions of women artists to the characterization

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of this period, and in particular their innovations with feeling and emotion, should then both increase our understanding of these key moments in late twentieth-century art, as well as providing better tools for analysing the present. Upsetting the traditional characterization of an historical period by drawing attention to the inclusion or exclusion of women is a useful feminist tactic, but providing alternatives for thinking about what women artists have achieved, their specific innovations and explorations of aesthetic possibilities, is to move past critique towards construction and the building of alternative feminist methods. The latter goal has guided this book.

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Notes

introduction 1. Julia Kristeva cited in Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art, in, of and from the Feminine, exh. cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art; Kortrijk: Kanaal Art Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), epigraph, n.p. 2. Julia Kristeva, ‘Oscillation between power and denial: an interview with Xavière Gauthier’, trans. Marilyn A. August, in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms: An Anthology (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), p. 165 3. The same quote from Kristeva that opens de Zegher’s exhibition catalogue is used to open an early essay on Italian women’s art. See Anne-Marie SauzeauBoetti, ‘Negative capability as practice in women’s art’, Studio International 191.979 (Jan/Feb 1976), pp. 24–29 4. De Zegher, ‘Introduction: Inside the Visible’, Inside the Visible, p. 32 5. ibid, p.21 6. More recently, Kristeva has turned to the question of feminine genius. See Julia Kristeva, ‘Is there a feminine genius?’, Critical Inquiry 30.3 (Spring 2004), pp. 493–504. Here she specifically examines the ‘feminine aspect of woman’ (p. 497). While she still adheres to the idea of ‘psychic bisexuality’ (p. 503), where the feminine position is available to both sexes, she nonetheless specifically focuses on the creative and intellectual work of women, namely Melanie Klein, Hannah Arendt and Colette 7. ‘Strategic essentialism’ is a strategy proposed by Gayatri Spivak. She first uses this phrase in an interview with Elizabeth Grosz. See Grosz, ‘Criticism, feminism and the institution. An interview with Gayatri Spivak’, Thesis Eleven 10/11 (1985), pp. 175–89 8. Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 2 9. Clare Hemmings, ‘Invoking affect: cultural theory and the ontological turn’, Cultural Studies 19.5 (Sept 2005), pp. 556–57. Much of this scholarship, now 146

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notes

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

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dubbed part of the ‘affective turn’, follows the anti-psychological account of affect provided by the philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. See their explanation of affects as ‘non-human becomings of man’ in What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 169 Iréne Matthis, ‘Sketch for a metapsychology of affect’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 81.3 (2000), p. 217 ibid Altieri: The Particulars of Rapture, p. 2 ibid Ruth Stein, Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect (London: Karnac Books, 1991), p. xii Leo Steinberg, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 63 Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004) Guy Brett, Kinetic Art: The Language of Movement (London: Studio Vista, 1968), pp. 61–65; Guy Brett, ‘The Century of Kinesthesia’, Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic, exh. cat. (London: Hayward Gallery and Barcelona: Museu D’Art Contemporani, 2000), pp. 52–56; Mari Carmen Ramirez, ‘Tactics for thriving on adversity: conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–1980’, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), pp. 53–71; Guy Brett, ‘Life strategies: overview and selection: Buenos Aires/London/Rio de Janeiro/ Santiago de Chile 1960–1980’; Paul Schimmel, Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1998), pp. 197–225 Yve-Alain Bois, Introduction to Lygia Clark, ‘Nostalgia of the body’, October 69 (1994), pp. 87–88 Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View of Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (n.p.: Basic Books, 1985), p. 54 Lucy Lippard points to these contradictions and draws out the link to eroticism. She cites Robert Smithson whose assessment of Hesse’s work joined humour, the funereal and petrifaction. Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 185 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Eva Hesse: Contingent’, Bachelors (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), p. 92 Ana Mendieta, ‘A selection of statements and notes’, Sulfur 22, Spring 1988, p. 71 See, for example, Miwon Kwon, ‘Bloody valentines: afterimages by Ana Mendieta’, in Inside the Visible, p. 168; and Jane Blocker, Where is Ana

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Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), p. 25 24. See comments by Judith Barry, ‘Women, representation, and performance art: Northern California’, in C. E. Loeffler and D. Tong (eds), Performance Anthology: Source Book for a Decade of California Performance Art (San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1980), p. 449 25. Robert Atkins’ 1978 unpublished review of Cha’s performance Other Things Seen Other Things Heard (Ailleurs) cited by Katherine Russell Bond, ‘Exile and the Maiden: The performance art of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’, Korean Culture (Summer 1986), p. 17

1 minimalism and subjectivity: aesthetics and the anti-aesthetic tradition 1. Roundtable, ‘Conceptual art and the reception of Duchamp’, October 70 (1994), p. 140. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘Minimalism, Subjectivity and Aesthetics: Rethinking the Anti-Aesthetic Tradition in Late-Modern Art’, Journal of Visual Arts Practice, 5.3 (2006), pp. 127 - 142 2. ibid 3. Donald Judd, ‘Specific objects’ (1965), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 812 4. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on sculpture, part 2’ (1966), Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), p. 15 5. Frank Stella in ‘Questions to Stella and Judd by Bruce Glaser’ (1966), in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 121 6. Carl Andre, ‘Preface to Stripe Painting’ (1959), Theories and Documents, p. 124 7. Stella: ‘Questions to Stella’, p. 121 8. Anna Chave’s provocative work also challenges the anti-subjective reading of minimalism. She shows how minimalism can still be interpreted through an expressionist theory of art. See Anna C. Chave, ‘Minimalism and the rhetoric of power’, in Holliday T. Day (ed.), Power: Its Myths and Mores in American Art 1961–1991 (Indianapolis: Indianapolis Museum of Art, 1991), pp. 116–40 and ‘Minimalism and biography’, The Art Bulletin 82.1 (Mar 2000), pp. 148–63 9. Two excellent accounts of the importance of phenomenology for thinking about minimalism are: James Meyer, ‘The uses of Merleau-Ponty’,

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11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

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Minimalisms: Rezeptionsformen der 90er Jahre (Ostfildern: Cantz, 1998), pp. 178–89 and Alex Potts, ‘The phenomenological turn’, The Sculptural Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 207–34 Gyorgy Markus uses this schema in two of his published texts on aesthetics: ‘Hegel and the end of art’, Literature and Aesthetics 6 (Oct 1996), pp. 7–26 and ‘The paradoxical unity of culture: the arts and the sciences’, Thesis Eleven 75.1 (2003), pp. 7–24 Bill Beckley, ‘ Introduction: generosity and the black swan’, in Bill Beckley and David Shapiro (eds), Uncontrollable Beauty: Towards a New Aesthetics (New York: Allworth Press, 1998), p. xiv Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 24 Christine Battersby has noted that aesthetics is a ‘dirty word’, particularly in feminist and left-oriented approaches to art history and film theory. See Battersby, ‘Situating the aesthetic: a feminist defence’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991), p. 35 Michael Fried, ‘Art and objecthood’, in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 116–47 ibid, p. 140 Hal Foster, ‘The crux of minimalism’, Individuals: A Selected History of Contemporary Art 1945–1986 (New York: Abbeville, 1986), p. 173 As Barthes put it: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.’ See Barthes, ‘The death of the author’, Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), p. 148 While Kant considers the production of art in his concept of genius, his aesthetics is much more concerned with giving an account of reception or judgment. The fact that the work of the genius must meet the requirements of taste (or judgment) and thus serve as an exemplar for other artists indicates that even production is linked to reception. Genius, Kant says, should be used ‘in a way that can stand the test of the power of judgment.’ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 178 ibid, p. 60 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd edn (London: Sheed and Ward, 1979), p. 87 Hegel cited in ibid, p. 45

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22. Thierry de Duve, ‘Performance here and now: minimal art, a plea for a new genre of theatre’, trans. D. Guilbaut, Open Letter 5–6 (Summer/Fall 1983), p. 259. One of the very few references to this article I have found is in Michael Fried’s recent reevaluation of his own contributions to this debate. See Fried, ‘An introduction to my art criticism’, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 41 23. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sense and sensibility: reflections on post 60s sculpture’, Artforum 12.3 (Nov 1973), p. 44 24. ibid, p. 49 25. ibid, p. 50 26. ibid, p. 50 27. ibid, p. 48 28. ibid, p. 51 29. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781), trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1933), p. 66. In this text Kant’s account of the transcendental aesthetic is about sensibility in general, not the engagement with art in particular. In a footnote he actually opposes the now accepted usage of the term ‘aesthetics’, which he later adopts in the Critique of Judgment 30. Krauss: ‘Sense and sensibility’, p. 50 31. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 293 32. Krauss: ‘Sense and sensibility’, p. 50 33. Merleau-Ponty: The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 328 34. Krauss: ‘Sense and sensibility’, p. 50 35. Merleau-Ponty: The Phenomenology of Perception, p. 327 36. ibid, p. 296 37. ibid, p. 339 38. ibid, p. 296 39. See James Meyer’s reading of Krauss in ‘The uses of Merleau-Ponty’, pp. 178–89 40. Foster: ‘The crux of minimalism’, pp. 170–71. My point here is that the call to take into account different kinds of spectators does not present a new problem for an aesthetics of reception. The impossibility of ‘the universal voice’ is already acknowledged as the central problem. Slavoj Zizek’s solution to this problem is to argue that each particular reading should be made in the name of the universal or, to put this back into Kant’s terms, each subject should appeal to the idea of the universal voice. See Slavoj Zizek, ‘A leftist plea for Eurocentrism’, Critical Inquiry 24.4 (Summer 1998), pp. 988–1009 41. James Meyer notes that ‘the appeal of a Judd or Morris cube was not the unbridled subjectivity of a drip canvas, but its lack of affect’. Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 25

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42. Edward Casey, ‘Expression and communication in art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30 (Winter 1971), p. 198 43. In the reworked analysis of Morris in her book Passages in Modern Sculpture, Krauss places far greater emphasis on what we cannot see, namely the sameness of the L-Beams, with sameness argued to be an ideal structure that is prior to experience. It seems to me that this emphasis on invisibility better serves the idea of the work enacting a theory of the subject, however it thereby also reintroduces Kant’s transcendental aesthetic. See Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 266–67 44. De Duve: ‘Performance here and now’, p. 234 45. ibid, p. 246 46. ibid, p. 251 47. ibid, p. 250 48. ibid 49. Fried: ‘Art and objecthood’, p. 129 50. De Duve: ‘Performance here and now’, p. 250 51. ibid 52. ibid, p. 255 53. ibid, p. 245 54. ibid, p. 255 55. ibid 56. ibid 57. Fried: ‘Art and objecthood’, p. 128 58. ibid, p. 127 59. R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Press, 1989), p. 365. Hinshelwood uses this phrase specifically to explain introjected internal objects, the breast in the stomach, whereas I’m using it to think about how an unpleasant feeling might be thought to be caused by something outside. In Klein, inside and outside are often interimplicated in highly complex ways. She states: ‘Even if objects are felt to be external, they become through introjection internal persecutors.’ See Klein, ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’ (1946), Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–1963 (London: Virago, 1988), p. 5 60. De Duve: ‘Performance here and now’, p. 252 61. ibid, p. 253 62. ibid, pp. 250–51 63. ibid, p. 251 64. ibid, p. 253 65. ibid, p. 259

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66. See James Meyer’s account of this tradition in ‘Nomads: figures of travel in contemporary art’, Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, de-, dis-, ex- 4 (2000), pp. 12–15 67. De Duve: ‘Performance here and now’, p. 259

2

f e e li n g a n d l a te m o d e r n a r t

1. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its discontents’ (1930), Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 270–71. An earlier version of this chapter appeared as ‘Mild Intoxication and other Aesthetic Feelings: Psychoanalysis and Art Revisited,’ Angelaki 10.31(2005), pp. 57–70 2. Marcel Duchamp, ‘Apropos of “readymades” ’ (1961), in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 819 3. Notable exceptions are Clement Greenberg and Thierry de Duve. De Duve has recently made feeling central to his idiosyncratic history of 100 years of contemporary art. See Thierry de Duve, Look, 100 Years of Contemporary Art, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (GhentAmsterdam: Ludion, 2001). De Duve works within a Kantian framework where feeling is a guide for taste. He elaborates on his method in several places. See Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines, trans. Brian Holmes (Paris: Disvoir, n.d.), pp. 31–36, 93–96; ‘Critical ref lections’, Artforum (Sept 1995), pp. 72–73, 117–18, 121 and ‘Art was a proper name’, Kant After Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 3–86 4. Sigmund Freud, ‘Inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety’ (1926), On Psychopathology: Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1993), p. 288 5. André Green, ‘Conceptions of affect’, On Private Madness, trans. Trevor Hartnup (London: Karnac, 1997), p. 174 6. André Green, The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 261, 275 7. ibid, p. 107 8. ibid, p. 289 9. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment (1790), trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), p. 62 10. See, for example, Hal Foster, ‘The expressive fallacy’, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Washington: Bay Press, 1985), pp. 59–77

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153

11. Edward Casey, ‘Expression and communication in art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30 (Winter 1971), p. 198 12. ibid, p. 200 13. Michael Fried, ‘Art and objecthood’, in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 127 14. Allan Sekula cited in Rosalyn Deutsche, ‘Property values: Hans Haacke, real estate and the museum’, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 170 15. See Deutsche: ‘Property values’ for a full account of the work’s reception 16. Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 7 17. ibid, p. 3 18. ibid, p. 6 19. Joyce McDougall, Theaters of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on the Psychoanalytic Stage (London: Free Association Press, 1986), p. 148 20. Gyorgy Markus, ‘The paradoxical unity of culture: the arts and the sciences’, Thesis Eleven 75.1 (2003), p. 11 21. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The psychoanalytic approach to artistic and literary expression’, trans. anonymous, in Robert Harvey and Mark S. Roberts (eds), Toward the Postmodern (New York: Humanity Books, 1999), p. 11 22. Jack Spector, ‘The state of psychoanalytic research in art history’, The Art Bulletin 70.1 (Mar 1988), p. 59 23. These are Parveen Adams’ exact words. See her introduction to her book The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Difference (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 2 24. Freud quoted in Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art: An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, trans. Winifred Woodhull (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 70 25. ibid, p. 74 26. This point is emphasized by Silvan Tomkins. See Tomkins, ‘The primary site of the affects: the face’, Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1: The Positive Affects (New York: Springer, 1962), pp. 204–42 27. Kofman: The Childhood of Art, p. 74 28. Sol LeWitt, ‘Serial project no.1 (ABCD)’ (1966), in James Meyer (ed.), Minimalism (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 226 29. Frederic Jameson, ‘Postmodernism, or the cultural logic of late capitalism’, New Left Review 146 (July–Aug 1984), p. 61 30. Bataille cited in Yve-Alain Bois, ‘The use value of “formless” ’, in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (eds), Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone, 1997), p. 14

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31. ibid 32. Martin Jay, ‘Modernism and the specter of psychologism’, Modernism and Modernity 3.2 (1996), pp. 97, 102 33. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968). Barthes dismisses expressive writing as a ‘myth’ (p. 69), advocating ‘colourless writing’ and ‘a neutral and inert state of form’ (pp. 76–78) 34. Leo Steinberg, ‘Jasper Johns: the first seven years of his art’, Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 52. Steinberg argues in relation to Jasper Johns that impersonal objectivity is not the absence of feeling but ‘a way of feeling’. Ascetic passion, he suggests, has a very long history; it ‘sustains the drive of a youthful Velázquez, or a Courbet, while they shake the emotional slop from themselves and their models’ 35. Moira Roth, ‘The aesthetic of indifference’, Artforum 16.3 (Nov 1977), pp. 46–53 36. Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy (1908), trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International University Press, 1953), pp. 14–17 37. ibid, p. 23 38. See, for example, Esther Sánchez-Pardo, Cultures of the Death Drive: Melanie Klein and Modernist Melancholia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003) and Lyndsey Stonebridge, The Destructive Element: British Psychoanalysis and Modernism (New York: Routledge, 1998) 39. Barbara Rose, ‘ABC art’ (1965), Minimal Art, pp. 282, 285 40. ibid, p. 296 41. John Perreault, ‘Minimal abstracts’ (1967), Minimal Art, p. 260 42. Lawrence Alloway, ‘Systemic painting’ (1966), Minimal Art, p. 46 43. William Rubin cited in Frances Colpitt, Minimal Art: The Critical Perspective (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1993), p. 117 44. Ed Sommer cited in Colpitt: Critical Perspective, p. 119 45. The story of the kettle, from which is derived the idea of ‘kettle logic’, is recounted in both The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 197 and Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 100. The story is as follows: a neighbour who borrows a kettle and returns it in a damaged condition defends himself with three mutually contradictory excuses: he gave it back undamaged, he didn’t borrow it, and it was already damaged 46. Max Kozloff, ‘Psychological dynamics in art criticism of the sixties’ (1967), Renderings: Critical Essays on a Century of Modern Art (London: Studio Vista, 1970), p. 314

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47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

155

Perreault: ‘Minimal abstracts’, p. 259 Brian O’Doherty, ‘Minus Plato’ (1966), Minimal Art, pp. 252–53 ibid, p. 253 Tomkins’ reports are cited in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, ‘Shame in the cybernetic fold: reading Silvan Tomkins’, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 11 Green: Fabric of Affect, pp. 178, 252 Freud quoted in Green: The Fabric of Affect, p. 14 Tomkins, ‘What are affects?’, Shame and Its Sisters, pp. 68–73 Green: The Fabric of Affect, p. 289 McDougall: Theaters of the Mind, p. 153 André Green, ‘Postscript 1: free reflections on the representation of affect’ (1984), The Fabric of Affect, p. 268

3

p a r t i c i p a t i o n , a f f e c t a n d t h e b o d y : l yg i a c l a r k

1. Lygia Clark, ‘Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica: letters 1968–69’, trans. Michael Asbury, in Claire Bishop (ed.), Participation: Documents of Contemporary Art, (London: Whitechapel and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006), p. 110 2. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s doubt’, in Galen A. Johnson (ed.), The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: Philosophy and Painting, trans. Michael B. Smith (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1993), pp. 65, 69 3. ibid, p. 67 4. ibid, p. 68 5. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 327 6. Lygia Clark, ‘The collective body’, in Manuel Borja-Villel (ed.), Lygia Clark, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1998), p. 306 7. In addition to Clark’s writings, a film on her body therapy, Mémoria do corpo (1984) (dr. Mário Carneiro), further documents her psychoanalytic ideas. Suely Rolnik has assembled an invaluable video archive of interviews with various people who knew Clark. Of particular relevance for exploring her ideas about psychoanalysis and her development of body therapy are interviews with the French psychoanalyst Pierre Fédida, with whom Clark started analysis in 1972, and Lula Wanderley, an ex-patient and practitioner of her form of therapy. The video archive was part of the exhibition curated by Rolnik, Lygia Clark de l’oeuvre a l’événement, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 8 October – 31 December 2005

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8. Ferreira Gullar, ‘Neo-concrete manifesto’, Geometric Abstraction: Latin American Art from the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection, exh. cat. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 154 9. Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Some Latin Americans in Paris’, Geometric Abstraction, p. 88. Paulo Herkenhoff, in an essay in the same catalogue, makes a counter argument to Bois, claiming that the interests of Ferreira Gullar and Mario Pedrosa influenced the artists. See Herkenhoff, ‘Divergent parallels: towards a comparative study of neo-concretism and minimalism’, pp. 111–12. The manifesto is also reproduced in the American journal October with an introduction by Yve-Alain Bois. There it is presented in the context of Clark’s writings and is attributed to the seven signatories. See Amílcar de Castro, et al., ‘1959: Neo-concretist manifesto’ in Lygia Clark, ‘Nostalgia of the body’, October 69 (1994), pp. 91–95 10. De Castro: ‘1959: Neo-concretist manifesto’, p. 91 11. ibid, p. 93 12. ibid, p. 94 13. ibid 14. Lygia Clark, ‘Conference given in the Belo Horizonte National School of Architecture in 1956’, Lygia Clark, p. 72 15. Lygia Clark, ‘Lygia Clark and the concrete expressional space’ (1959), Lygia Clark, p. 85 16. Lygia Clark, ‘Light line’ (1958), Lygia Clark, p. 102 17. ibid 18. Robert Morris, ‘Notes on sculpture, part 2’ (1966), Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge, Mass.; MIT Press, 1995), p. 15 19. Clark cited in Mary Schneider Enriquez, ‘Mapping change: a historical perspective on geometric abstraction in Argentina, Venezuela, and Brazil’, Geometric Abstraction, p. 32 20. Clark: ‘Conference given in the Belo Horizonte’, p. 71 21. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 22. There is, however, a crucial difference between the trajectory of Clark’s future work and minimalism. In minimalist sculpture the encounter between beholder and work of art is staged – it is a ‘theatrical’ relation, to use Michael Fried’s term. Michael Fried, ‘Art and objecthood’, in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 116–47. In other words, the beholder self-consciously enters an established situation that requires his or her presence. In Clark’s work, by contrast, the role of the beholder is ultimately denied; participation is meant

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23. 24.

25.

26. 27.

28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

157

to fully absorb the viewer into the work of art, not to theatricalize their presence. Of course, when Clark’s works are exhibited in a gallery or museum, participants can be watched by others who are hopefully thereby provoked to participate Bois: ‘Some Latin Americans in Paris’, p. 88 See Donald Judd, ‘Specific objects’ (1965), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), pp. 809–12 See Ferreira Gullar, ‘Theory of the non-object’, trans. Michael Asbury, in Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London: Institute of International Visual Arts and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 170–73. Gullar discusses the genesis of the term and its relationship to Clark’s beasts in Ferreira Gullar, ‘Frente group and neo-concrete reaction’, in Aracy Amaral (ed.), Constructive Art in Brazil: Adolpho Leirner Collection, exh. cat. (São Paulo: DBA, 1998), pp. 156–58 Lygia Clark, ‘Untitled Text’ (1960), Lygia Clark, p. 140 There is some debate about the starting date of the Bichos series, with dates varying between 1959 and 1960. The starting date of 1959 is given by Gabriela Rangel Mantilla and Jacqueline Barnitz. See Mantilla, ‘Lygia Clark’, in Geometric Abstraction, p. 244 and Barnitz, Twentieth-Century Art of Latin America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), p. 218. According to Paulo Herkenhoff the series began in 1960. See Herkenhoff, ‘Lygia Clark’, Lygia Clark, p. 42 Lygia Clark, ‘Bichos’ (1983), Lygia Clark, p. 121 ibid ibid Donald Judd, ‘Lygia Clark’, Arts Magazine 37.8 (Apr 1963), p. 60 David Medalla, ‘Lygia Clark: an appreciation’, Signals (Feb/Mar 1965), p. 11 David Medalla, ‘Signals’, in Rasheed Araeen (ed.), The Other Story: AfroAsian Artists in Post-War Britain (London: Hayward Gallery, 1989), p. 116 Judd: ‘Specific Objects’, p. 812 Lygia Clark, ‘1965: Concerning the instant’, ‘Nostalgia of the Body’, p. 100 Gaston Bachelard, ‘The intuition of the instant’, trans. Sebastian Brett, Signals (Apr–May 1965), p. 5 Lygia Clark, ‘On the magic of the object’, Lygia Clark, p. 153 Lygia Clark, ‘1964: Trailings’, ‘Nostalgia of the body’, p. 99 Maria Alice Milliet, ‘From concretist paradox to experimental exercise of freedom’, in Edward J. Sullivan (ed.), Brazil: Body and Soul, exh. cat. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2002), p. 389 Clark: ‘1964: Trailings’, p. 99

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41. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), p. 138 42. Merleau-Ponty, ‘Eye and mind’, The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, pp. 125–26 43. Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1: The Positive Affects (New York: Springer, 1962), p. 498 44. Mario Pedrosa cited in Guy Brett, ‘Lygia Clark: six cells’, Lygia Clark, p. 21 45. Suely Rolnik, ‘Molding a contemporary soul: the empty-full of Lygia Clark’, trans. Clifford Landers, in Susan Martin and Alma Ruiz (eds), The Experimental Exercise of Freedom: Lygia Clark, Gego, Mathias Goeritz, Hélio Oiticica and Mira Schendel, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1999), p. 77 46. Lygia Clark, ‘L’art c’est le corps’ (1973), Lygia Clark, p. 187 47. Hélio Oiticica cited in Rolnik: ‘Molding a contemporary soul’, pp. 79–82 48. Clark: ‘L’art c’est le corps’, p. 188 49. Daniel Stern, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View of Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (n.p.: Basic Books, 1985), p. 54 50. ibid 51. Sigmund Freud, ‘The economic problem of masochism’, On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 414 52. Gaston Bachelard, The Dialectic of Duration (1950), trans. Mary McAllester Jones (Manchester: Clinamen, 2000), p. 142 53. ibid, p. 21 54. D. W. Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’, Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis: Collected Papers (London: Karnac, 1984), p. 233 55. ibid, p. 230 56. Bois: Introduction to ‘Nostalgia of the body’, p. 86 57. Winnicott: ‘Transitional objects’, p. 240 58. Guy Brett, ‘Lygia Clark: the borderline between art life’, Third Text (Autumn 1987), p. 80 59. Lygia Clark, ‘On the fantastic reality of today and tomorrow’ (1967), Lygia Clark, p. 219 60. Brett: ‘Lygia Clark: the borderline’, p. 81 61. Clark: ‘On the fantastic reality’, p. 220 62. Lygia Clark, ‘Letter to Helio Oiticica’ (1968), Lygia Clark, p. 236 63. Clark: ‘On the fantastic reality’, p. 220 64. Winnicott cited in Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 80 65. ibid, p. 81

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159

66. Guy Brett has noted this paradoxical pursuit of liberation by means of its opposite: binding, blocking, restricting. See Brett: ‘Lygia Clark: six cells’, pp. 24–25. Silvan Tomkins discusses such claustrophobic wishes. See Tomkins: Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1, p. 422 67. Merleau-Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception, p. 215 68. See Tomkins’ discussion of claustral joy. Tomkins: Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1, pp. 419–22 69. Clark cited by Brett: ‘Lygia Clark: the borderline’, p. 83 70. Clark: ‘L’art c’est le corps’, p. 233 71. Clark’s idea of cells that are part of an infinite tissue echoes Merleau-Ponty’s metaphor used to describe vision and the body as continuous and yet separate from the world. The body is a ‘fold’ in the flesh of the world. See MerleauPonty: The Visible and the Invisible, p. 146 72. Clark: ‘L’art c’est le corps’, p. 233 73. Clark, ‘The body is the house: sexuality, invasion of individual territory’ (1971), Lygia Clark, p. 248 74. Clark: ‘Untitled text’, Lygia Clark, p. 298 75. Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) 76. The work of Melanie Klein is referred to in Clark’s article, ‘Relational objects’, Lygia Clark, p. 321. Klein’s work models the infant’s phantasies and defences predominantly in terms of oral metaphors or strategies: for example, incorporation and projection. The desire to devour the mother and her babies is one of many graphic phantasies she recounts 77. Brett notes how Clark renews Oswald de Andrade’s 1928 idea of Antropofágia, namely the idea that Brazilian culture ‘swallowed’ other cultures in order to create its own. See Brett: ‘Lygia Clark: six cells’, p. 23 78. Clark: ‘Untitled text’, Lygia Clark, p. 280 79. Clark: ‘On the magic of the object’, p. 154 80. Thierry de Duve, ‘Performance here and now: minimal art, a plea for a new genre of theatre’, trans. D. Guilbaut, Open Letter 5–6 (Summer/Fall 1983), p. 259

4 eva h e s s e’s l a te s c u l p t u r e s: e lu s i ve ex p r e s s i o n and unconscious affect 1. Robert Smithson in conversation with Lucy Lippard, in Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: Da Capo, 1992), p. 6 2. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sense and sensibility: reflections on post 60s sculpture’, Artforum 12.3 (Nov 1973), p. 45

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3. ibid, p. 46 4. Rosalind Krauss, ‘Eva Hesse: Contingent’, Bachelors (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), p. 92 5. Joan Copjec, Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), p. 14 6. Anna C. Chave, ‘Minimalism and biography’, The Art Bulletin 82.1 (Mar 2000), pp. 149–63; Briony Fer, ‘Bordering on blank: Eva Hesse and minimalism’, On Abstract Art (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 109–30 7. Fer: ‘Bordering on blank’, p. 114 8. For example, John Perreault in a review from 1968 refers to the way in which ‘her sculpture (or her anti-sculpture) causes very complicated emotions in the viewer’. Perreault cited in Lucy Lippard: Eva Hesse, p. 132 9. Lippard: Eva Hesse, p. 185 10. Briony Fer’s various readings of Hesse’s work bring to the fore different contradictions. For example, she notes how bodily affect is summoned and cancelled out in ‘Objects beyond objecthood’, Oxford Art Journal 22.2 (1999), p. 35. In ‘Bordering on blank’ she argues that Hesse’s work has bodily connotations but is not ‘of the body’ (p. 109); specific bodily connotations are overridden by ‘a kind of blankness’ (p. 111). 11. Anne Middleton Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 268 12. ibid, p. 273 13. Lippard cited in Wagner: Three Artists, pp. 252–53 14. Maurice Berger, ‘Objects of liberation: the sculpture of Eva Hesse’, Eva Hesse: A Retrospective (New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery and Yale University Press, 1992), p. 123 15. Ignacio Matte-Blanco, Thinking, Feeling, and Being: Clinical Reflections on the Fundamental Antinomy of Human Beings and World (London: Routledge, 1988), p. 64 16. Lippard: Eva Hesse, p. 185 17. ibid, p. 197 18. Wagner: Three Artists, p. 262 19. Helen Molesworth, Part Object, Part Sculpture, exh. cat. (Columbus, Ohio: Wexner Center for the Arts and Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006); Mignon Nixon, ‘Posing the phallus’, October 92 (Spring 2000), pp. 99–127; Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Dumb’, Eva Hesse Sculpture, exh. cat. (New York: The Jewish Museum and London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 19; Briony Fer, ‘Eva Hesse and color’, October 119 (Winter 2007), p. 24

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161

20. R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 2nd edn (London: Free Association, 1991), p. 378 21. Bion cited in Hinshelwood: A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, p. 378 22. Juliet Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, The Selected Melanie Klein (London: Penguin, 1986), p. 21 23. Melanie Klein, ‘The origins of transference’ (1952), Envy and Gratitude and Other Works 1946–63 (London: Virago, 1988), p. 53 24. Hesse cited in Elisabeth Sussman (ed.), Eva Hesse, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), p. 165 25. Mignon Nixon, ‘Ringaround Arosie: 2 in 1’, in Mignon Nixon (ed.), Eva Hesse, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), p. 199 26. Michael Balint, ‘Notes on the dissolution of object-representation in modern art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 5 (1951), pp. 323–27 27. Bois: ‘Dumb’, p. 21 28. ibid, p. 24 29. Hesse in Cindy Nemser, ‘An interview with Eva Hesse’, Artforum 8.9 (May 1970), p. 60 30. ibid 31. ibid 32. Bill Barrette, Eva Hesse Sculpture: Catalogue Raisonné (New York: Timkin, 1989), p. 66 33. Lautréamont cited in Bois: ‘Dumb’, p. 18 34. Lippard, ‘Eccentric abstraction’, Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: Dutton, 1971), p. 100 35. Hesse in Nemser: ‘An interview’, p. 60 36. Lippard: Eva Hesse, p. 126 37. ibid, p. 106 38. ibid, pp. 108–9 39. ibid, p. 83 40. Nixon: ‘Ringaround Arosie’, p. 204 41. William S. Wilson, ‘Eva Hesse: on the threshold of illusions’, in Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Inside the Visible: An Elliptical Traverse of Twentieth Century Art, in, of and from the Feminine, exh. cat. (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art; Kortrijk: Kanaal Art Foundation; Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 430–31 42. ibid, p. 430 43. ibid, p. 431–32 44. ibid, p. 431 45. ibid, p. 432

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46. Lippard: Eva Hesse, p. 156; Briony Fer, The Infinite Line: Re-making Art after Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 140 47. Lippard: Eva Hesse, p. 138 48. Edward Casey, ‘Expression and communication in art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30 (Winter 1971), p. 200 49. Contingent is in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia and had not been on public display since the mid 1990s. It was recently included in the National Gallery exhibition Soft Sculpture (24 April–12 July 2009), curated by Lucina Ward. The middle latex sections have changed most significantly, while the fibreglass ends have also yellowed 50. Lippard: Eva Hesse, p. 164 51. ibid, p. 164 52. Hesse’s catalogue statement cited in Lippard: Eva Hesse, p. 165 53. Anna C. Chave, ‘Eva Hesse: a “girl being a sculpture” ’, Eva Hesse: A Retrospective, p. 101. Chave cited in Wagner: Three Artists, p. 252 54. See, for example, Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, ‘Freud on unconscious affects, mourning and the erotic mind’, in Michael P. Levine (ed.), The Analytic Freud: Philosophy and Psychoanalysis (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 195–210 55. Sigmund Freud, ‘The unconscious’ (1915), On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 180 56. ibid 57. ibid, p. 181 58. Green draws attention to Freud’s ‘last word’ in his ‘Fetishism’ paper of 1927. In that paper affect is repressed and the idea is disavowed. André Green, The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 55–56 59. Matte-Blanco: Thinking, Feeling, p. 54 60. ibid, p. 76 61. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, ‘Shame in the cybernetic fold: reading Silvan Tomkins’, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 2 62. Tomkins, ‘What are affects?’, Shame and Its Sisters, p. 34 63. ibid, p. 74. Later, Tomkins will distinguish between disgust and dissmell, taking the final number of affects to nine 64. Tomkins does discuss the transformation of one affect into another (fear to interest–excitement) based on their physiological similarities. He states: ‘Of all the affects there are probably no two which contain more overlapping autonomic and striped muscle responses in common. It is not difficult to

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65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

163

envision the transformation of one affect into the other by a few relatively minor changes in heart rate, breathing, muscle tension and so on.’ ‘Affect dynamics’, Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1: The Positive Affects (New York: Springer, 1962), pp. 291–92 Matte-Blanco: Thinking, Feeling, p. 91 ibid ibid ibid, p. 74 ibid, p. 75 ibid, p. 76 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905), trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 227 Sublimation is an undeveloped part of Freud’s theory. James Strachey notes in an editorial footnote that there may have been a paper directly on sublimation, which was lost or destroyed. Strachey in Freud, ‘Instincts and their vicissitudes’ (1915), On Metapsychology, p. 123, fn 4 Freud, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci and a memory of his childhood’ (1910), Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 151–231 Freud: Jokes, p. 193 As noted earlier, Briony Fer registers that bodily affect is summoned, but she stresses how it is cancelled out. See Fer: ‘Objects beyond objecthood’, p. 35. Anne Wagner similarly argues Hesse’s control of ‘recalcitrant materials’ included the ability to remove affect. Hesse, she states: ‘is able to strip those materials of any lingering affect: the taint of sensationalism or sentiment or a subjectivism run amok.’ Wagner: Three Artists, p. 257 Hesse cited in Lippard: Eva Hesse, p. 165

5 ana mendieta: affect miniaturization, emotional t i e s a n d t h e S il u e t a S e r i e s 1. Ana Mendieta, ‘A selection of statements and notes’, Sulfur 22 (Spring 1988), p. 72 2. Mendieta cited in Laura Roulet, ‘Ana Mendieta: a life in context’, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, Sculpture and Performances 1972–1985, exh. cat. (Washington: Hirshhorn Museum, 2004), p. 238 3. For example, Charles Merewether uses both of these terms in America Bride of the Sun: 500 Years Latin America and the Low Countries, exh. cat. (Antwerp: Royal Museum of Fine Arts and Imschoot Books, 1992). ‘Visceral’ is used in

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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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‘The migration of images: inscriptions of land and body in Latin America’ (p. 217); ‘haunting’ is used in ‘Ana Mendieta: the burial of Nanigo’ (p. 472) http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/postmedia/index.html (accessed July 2010) Sigmund Freud, ‘The Moses of Michelangelo’, Art and Literature, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), pp. 253–82 Mary Sabbatino, ‘Ana Mendieta Silueta works: sources and influences’, Ana Mendieta 1948–1985, exh. cat. (Helsinki: Helsinki City Art Museum, 1996), p. 47; Guy Brett, ‘One energy’, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, p. 186 See Jörg Heiser, ‘Emotional rescue’, Frieze 71 (Nov/Dec 2002), pp. 70–75 Mendieta: ‘A selection of statements’, p. 71 Linda Montana, ‘Interview with Mendieta’, Performance Artists Talking in the Eighties (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), p. 396 Mendieta: ‘A selection of statements’, p. 70 Luis Camnitzer, ‘Ana Mendieta’, Third Text 7 (1989), p. 52 Mendieta: ‘A selection of statements’, p. 70 Montana: ‘Interview’, p. 396 Olga Viso, ‘Memory of history’, Ana Mendieta: Earth Body, p. 45 Montana: ‘Interview’, p. 396 Viso notes that it is unlikely Mendieta knew about these parallel practices until February 1975. Viso: ‘Memory of history’, p. 247, fn 152 ibid, p. 74 ibid, p. 245, fn 86. Viso notes that Mendieta’s slide archive also indicates her interest in Mexican mummies Lucy Lippard, Overlay: Contemporary Art and the Art of Prehistory (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 40 The original point is made by William Zimmer. He is cited in Petra Barreras Del Rio, ‘Ana Mendieta: a historical overview’, Ana Mendieta: A Retrospective, exh. cat. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1987), p. 33; and Gerardo Mosquera, ‘Mendieta’, Cuba: Maps of Desire (Wien-Bozen: Folio Verlag, 1999), p. 231 Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and its discontents’ (1930), Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology, Civilization and its Discontents and Other Works, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 251 ibid, p. 252 Silvan Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1: The Positive Affects (New York: Springer, 1962), p. 419 Sigmund Freud ‘Group psychology and the analysis of the ego’ (1921), Civilization, Society and Religion, pp. 134–35. He states: ‘Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like a

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25.

26.

27.

28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

165

derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such’ Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie: Psychoanalysis, Mimesis and Affect, trans. Douglas Brick and others (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), p. 13 Sol LeWitt, ‘Paragraphs on conceptual art’ (1967), in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 825 Ana Mendieta in Eve Cockcroft, ‘Culture and survival’ (Interview with curator of Ritual and Rhythm: Visual Forces for Survival, Juan Sanchez, and two participating artists, Mendieta and Willie Birch), Art and Artists (Feb 1983), p. 17 Susan Best, ‘The serial spaces of Ana Mendieta’, Art History 30.1 (Feb 2007), pp. 57–82 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 142, see also p. 25 John Perreault, ‘Mendieta’, Artopia: John Perreault’s Art Diary: http:// www.artsjournal.com/artopia/2004/07/mendieta.html (accessed 9 August 2004) Mendieta quoted in Guy Brett: ‘One Energy’, p. 184 Brett: ‘One energy’, p. 184 Susan L. Stoops (ed.), More than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the ‘70s, exh. cat. (Waltham: Rose Art Museum, 1996) Donald Judd, ‘Specific objects’ (1965), in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900–1990 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 812. Mel Bochner, ‘Serial art, systems, solipsism’ (1967), in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), p. 94 Sol LeWitt, ‘Serial project no. 1 (ABCD)’ (1966), in James Meyer (ed.), Minimalism (London: Phaidon, 2000), p. 226 Sol LeWitt: ‘Paragraphs on conceptual art’, p. 824 Mel Bochner, ‘The serial attitude’, Artforum (Dec 1967), pp. 28–33 Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Conceptual art, 1952–1969: from the aesthetic of administration to the critique of institutions’, October: The Second Decade, 1986–1996 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), p. 131 ibid, p. 152 LeWitt: ‘Paragraphs on conceptual art’, p. 825 Helen Molesworth, Work Ethic, exh. cat. (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art and Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), p. 137

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42. Mark Godfrey, ‘From box to street and back again: an inadequate descriptive system from the seventies’, in Donna De Salvo (ed.), Open Systems: Rethinking Art c. 1970, exh. cat. (London: Tate Publishing, 2005), p. 25 43. ibid, p. 33 44. ibid, p. 46 45. The term ‘romantic conceptualism’ is used by Jörg Heiser in ‘A romantic measure’, Romantic Conceptualism, exh. cat. (Nuremberg: Kunsthalle Nürnberg, 2007), p. 135. Sol LeWitt: ‘Paragraphs on conceptual art’, p. 822 46. Godfrey, ‘From box to street’, p. 49, fn 65. Godfrey states: ‘As many writers have noted, what is surprising and engaging about Ader’s work is that for all its knowingness about the construction of emotions, it is no less touching’ 47. Jan Verwoert, In Search of the Miraculous (London: Afterall, 2006), p. 19 48. ibid 49. Silvan Tomkins, ‘Distress–anguish’, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (eds), Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 120 50. Ader’s sketchbook note cited in Ingrid Schaffer, Bennett Simpson and Tanya Leighton, The Big Nothing, exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 2004), p. 71 51. Tomkins, ‘Visibility and invisibility of the affect system’, Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1, p. 199 52. Tomkins, ‘What are affects?’, Shame and Its Sisters, p. 62 53. Tomkins: ‘Visibility and invisibility’, p. 183 54. ibid, p. 184 55. Walter Benjamin, ‘The author as producer’, trans. Edmund Jephcott, in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 304 56. This common position begins with Kant’s aesthetics. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987) 57. Tomkins, ‘Affect dynamics’, Affect Imagery Consciousness. Vol. 1, p. 292 58. Freud, ‘The ego and the id’ (1923), On Metapsychology: The Theory of Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 360 59. ibid, p. 360 60. See Alexander Alberro, ‘Beauty knows no pain’, Art Journal 63.2 (Summer 2004), p. 38 61. Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (London: Duckworth, 2006), p. 53 62. Allan Sekula cited in Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions: Art and Spatial Politics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), p. 170 63. http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/postmedia/index.html (accessed July 2010)

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64. Benjamin Buchloh, et al. ‘The reception of the sixties’, October 69 (Summer 1994), pp. 18–19

6 t h e d r e a m o f t h e a u d i e n c e: t h e m ov i n g i m a g e s o f theresa hak kyung cha 1. Juliana Chang, ‘Recit: previously unpublished works by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’, Fence 4.2 (Fall/Winter 2002), p. 82 2. Levinas’ demand for an ethics that precedes and exceeds ontology, and which concentrates on what is due to the other rather than the self, leads to what he refers to as unlimited or infinite responsibility for the other, a responsibility not expiated by deeds but, on the contrary, increased by them, one that even opens the subject to the danger of persecution by the other. See Emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordecht: Kluwer, 1991), p. 124 3. See Emmanuel Levinas, ‘Ethics as first philosophy’, trans. Seán Hand and Michael Temple, in Seán Hand (ed.), The Levinas Reader (London: Blackwell, 1989), pp. 75–87 4. Yve-Alain Bois, ‘The difficult task of erasing oneself: non-composition in twentieth- century art’, Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton University, 7 March 2007, http://video.ias.edu/stream&ref=10 (accessed July 2010) 5. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, ‘A Ble Wail’ (1975), Der Traum des Publikums: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. The Dream of the Audience, English publication ed. Constance M. Lewallen, extended German/English publication ed. Sabine Breitwieser), exh. cat. (Cologne: Walter König and Vienna: Generali Foundation, 2004), p. 154 6. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Presenting the unpresentable: the sublime’, Artforum 20.8 (Apr 1982), pp. 64–69 7. Margaret Iversen, ‘The deflationary impulse: postmodernism, feminism and the anti-aesthetic’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991), p. 84 8. ibid, p. 84 9. Michael Fried, for example, argues strongly for what he terms ‘presentness’, the work of art that manifests this quality gives one an experience of ‘a kind of instantaneousness’. He also describes this in spatial terms ‘at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest’. Fried, ‘Art and objecthood’ (1967), Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 167

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10. See Hal Foster’s ‘The expressive fallacy’, Recodings: Art, Spectacle, Cultural Politics (Washington: Bay Press, 1985), pp. 59–77. See also Benjamin Buchloh’s scorching critique of the ‘German intuition’ in ‘Figures of authority, ciphers of regression’, in Brian Wallis (ed.), Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 125 11. Yves Klein cited in Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Klein’s relevance for today’, October 119 (Winter 2007), p. 82 12. T. J. Clark cited in Iversen: ‘The deflationary impulse’, p. 81 13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indiana: Hackett, 1987), p. 55 14. ibid, p. 60 15. Marcel Duchamp, ‘Apropos of “readymades” ’ (1961), in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 819 16. LeWitt cited in Charles Harrison, Essays on Art and Language (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 49 17. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975) 18. Griselda Pollock, ‘Theory and pleasure’, in Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock (eds), Framing Feminism: Art and the Women’s Movement 1970–1985 (London: Pandora, 1987), p. 245 19. ibid, p. 248 20. Sylvia Harvey, ‘Whose Brecht? Memories for the eighties’, Screen (May–June 1982), pp. 53–54 21. Bertolt Brecht (1940), ‘Short description of a new technique of acting which produces an alienation effect’, in Michael Huxley and Noel Witts (eds), The Twentieth-Century Performance Reader, 2nd edn (London Routledge, 2002), p. 108 22. ibid 23. Alienation effects aim not to put the audience in a ‘trance’. Brecht, ‘A short organum for the theatre’, Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), p. 193. Being ‘entangled’ and the ‘hypnotic experience in the theatre’ is discussed in Brecht, ‘The German drama: Pre-Hitler’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 78. The idea of the audience being carried along or ‘carried away’ is discussed many times. See Brecht, ‘The question of criteria for judging acting’, Brecht on Theatre, p. 58 24. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée (1982) (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1995)

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25. See Suzanne Foley, Space Time Sound. Conceptual Art in the San Francisco Bay Area: The 1970s, exh. cat. (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1981) 26. Lawrence Rinder, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Other Things Seen, Other Things Heard, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of Contemporary Art, New American Film and Video Series 69, 23 December 1992 – 31 January 1993, n.p. 27. Cha cited in Lawrence R. Rinder, ‘The plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages’, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982), exh. cat. (Berkeley: University of California Press, University of California Berkeley Art Museum, 2001), pp. 19–20 28. For a discussion of the influence of analytic philosophy on conceptual art see Peter Osborne, ‘Conceptual art and/as philosophy’, in Michael Newman and Jon Bird (eds), Rewriting Conceptual Art (London: Reaktion, 1999), pp. 47–65 29. Rinder: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, n.p. 30. Kate Linker, ‘Foreword’, Difference: On Representation and Sexuality, exh. cat. (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985), p. 5 31. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, ‘Photography after art photography’, in Brian Wallis (ed.), After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), p. 80 32. See Brecht’s succinct explanation of the A-effect: ‘A representation that alienates is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar.’ Brecht: ‘A short organum’, p. 192 33. Victor Burgin, ‘The absence of presence: conceptualism and postmodernisms’, The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan, 1986), p. 49 34. Cha, Artist Statement (1976), cited in Rinder: ‘The plurality’, p. 23 35. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (ed.), Apparatus: Cinematographic Apparatus: Selected Writings (New York: Tanam, 1980) 36. Min Jung Lee, ‘Baring the apparatus: Dictée’s speaking subject writes a response’, Hitting Critical Mass 6.1 (Fall 1999), p. 38 37. Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The sublime and the avant-garde’, trans. Lisa Liebmann, Geoff Bennington and Marian Hobson, in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), The Lyotard Reader (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 199 38. Kant: Critique of Judgment, p. 109 39. ibid, p. 121 40. Rinder: ‘The plurality’, p. 22 41. ibid, pp. 21–23 42. Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. James Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), p. 266

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43. Russell Grigg cited by Bruce Fink in Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX Encore 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. with notes Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 44, fn 15 44. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Pause Still, 80 Langton St, San Francisco, CA, performance notes, 24 March 1979, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Archives, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive 45. Marker said: ‘I claim for the image the powers of the Madeleine.’ Marker cited in Uriel Orlow, ‘Chris Marker: the archival power of the image’, in Rebecca Comay (ed.), Lost in the Archives (Toronto: Alphabet City Media, 2002), p. 440 46. Cha: Pause Still, performance notes 47. Susan Woolf indicates that the image is of Cha as a child. Susan Wolf, ‘Theresa Cha: recalling telling retelling’, Afterimage 14.1 (Summer 1986), p. 12 48. P. Adams Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 408. Sitney refers to structural cinema as ‘cinema of the mind rather than the eye’ (p. 408). Peter Wollen notes the obvious links to conceptual art. He draws attention to the fact that conceptual art and structural film are rarely discussed together, despite being closely related. He attributes this to the strict division of labour between the art historian and the film historian, neither of whom take into account the work of the other. Peter Wollen, ‘Global conceptualism and North American conceptual art’, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s, exh. cat. (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), p. 84 49. Cha: ‘Artist’s statement’ (1978), Der Traum des Publikums, p. 80 50. Lee: ‘Baring the apparatus’, p. 42 51. Barry cited by Constance M. Lewallen, ‘Theresa Hak Kyung Cha – her time and place’, The Dream of the Audience, p. 10 52. Jean-Louis Baudry, ‘The apparatus’, in Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (ed.), Apparatus, pp. 41–62 53. Jacques Lacan, ‘Of the gaze as objet petit a’, in Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-analysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), p. 75 54. Robert Atkins’ 1978 unpublished review of Cha’s performance Other Things Seen Other Things Heard (Ailleurs) cited by Katherine Russell Bond, ‘Exile and the maiden: the performance art of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’, Korean Culture (Summer 1986), p. 17 55. Min cited in Bond: ‘Exile and the maiden’, p. 17 56. For a concise explanation of this idea see Cathy Caruth, ‘An interview with Jean Laplanche’, Postmodern Culture 11.2 (2001), pp. 1–12

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c o n c l u s i o n: w h i c h a n t h r o p o m o r p h i s m? 1. Carl Andre, in James Meyer (ed.), Cuts: Texts 1959–2004 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), p. 291 2. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), p. 387 3. Michel Foucault, ‘The discourse on language’, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972), p. 215 4. Margaret Iversen, ‘The deflationary impulse: postmodernism, feminism and the anti-aesthetic’, in Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1991), p. 84 5. Thierry de Duve, ‘Performance here and now: minimal art, a plea for a new genre of theatre’, trans. D. Guilbaut, Open Letter 5–6 (Summer/Fall 1983), p. 250 6. ibid 7. Yve-Alain Bois, Introduction to Lygia Clark, ‘Nostalgia of the body’, October 69 (1994), p. 85 8. The kind of art that stresses collaboration and participation has been described as representative of a social turn, whereby situations, and the relationships they display or engender, are the subject matter for art. See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. S. Pleasance and F. Woods (Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 2002). He argues that galleries are new public arenas that promote: ‘A culture of activity to counteract market-induced passivity.’ Bourriaud cited in Kate Fowle and Lars Bang Larsen, ‘Lunch hour: art, community, administered space and unproductive activity’, in Ted Purves (ed.), What We Want is Free: Generosity and Exchange in Recent Art (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), p. 20 9. Lygia Clark, ‘Letter to Hélio Oiticica’ (1974), in Manuel Borja-Villel (ed.), Lygia Clark, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Fundacio Antoni Tapies, 1998), p. 288 10. Winnicott cited in Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 81 11. Hesse cited in Anne Middleton Wagner, Three Artists (Three Women): Modernism and the Art of Hesse, Krasner, and O’Keeffe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 272 12. Hesse cited in Lucy Lippard, Eva Hesse (New York: Da Capo, 1992), p. 200 13. My translation. This characterization of their work by Lygia Clark appears as a frontispiece to their letters: Luciano Figueiredo (ed.), Lygia Clark and

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Hélio Oiticica, Cartas 1964–74 (Rio de Janeiro: Universidade Federal do Rio De Janeiro, 1996) 14. Ana Mendieta, ‘Art and politics’, ‘The struggle for culture today is the struggle for life’, in Gloria Moure (ed.), Ana Mendieta, exh. cat. (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 1996), pp. 167, 171 15. Ana Mendieta, ‘A selection of statements and notes’, Sulfur 22 (Spring 1988), p. 71 16. Lynn Zelevansky argues that minimalism ‘has a place in the second half of our century akin to the one held by Cubism in the first half ’. Zelevansky, ‘Sense and sensibility: women artists and minimalism in the nineties’, Sense and Sensibility: Women Artists and Minimalism in the Nineties (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994), p. 7. Mari Carmen Ramirez argues that ‘conceptualism can be considered the second major 20th-century shift in the understanding and production of art’. Ramirez, ‘Tactics for thriving on adversity: conceptualism in Latin America, 1960–1980’, Global Conceptualism: Points of Origin, 1950s–1980s (New York: Queens Museum of Art, 1999), p. 53. The tendency to see minimalism and conceptualism as guides for contemporary art can be seen in the work of many younger American critics. For example, see Miwon Kwon’s history of site-specificity, One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002), as well as the work of James Meyer. His essay on the figure of the nomad in contemporary art stresses the ‘legacy of the anti-aesthetic tradition’. Meyer, ‘Nomads: figures of travel in contemporary art’, Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, de-,dis-, ex-. Vol. 4 (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000), p. 13

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Index

Abraham, Karl, 73 Abramovic, Marina, 93 Abstract Expressionism, 16 Acconci, Vito, 93 Adams, Parveen, 153 Ader, Bas Jan, 94, 110 I’m too Sad to Tell You, 110–11 romantic conceptualism, 110 aesthetics, 8, 14, 15, 16, 17,28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 90, 114, 120, 124, 136, 149, 150 and the location of affect, 33, 35, 44 as body-to-body encounter, 48 classical, 8, 15, 16, 113 do-it-yourself. See conceptual art formalist, 35 German Idealism, 15, 18, 26, 149 of administration. See Buchloh, Benjamin of indifference. See Roth, Moira of impersonality, 116–18 of production, 17, 21, 28 of reception, 17, 20−22, 28, 150 of the 1950s, 119 of the work, 22, 28 shifts in, 17−18, 20, 28, 29−30, 40 transcendental. See Kant, Immanuel affect affective responses to artworks, 1,7, 8, 38−39, 43−46, 57, 63, 65, 72, 112 as anticipation. See Green, André affective tone of artworks. See art, affective dimensions and representation, 35, 43, 44 as anticipation. See Green, André corporeality of, 5, 9, 10, 37, 44, 61, 69 disruptive power, 4 evolutionary accounts of, 39

function, 32 in minimalism. See minimalism negative, 42, 45, 46, 88, 112 non-categorical, 5, 58, 84 positive, 42, 45, 63, 88, 113 startle-surprise, 43, 47−48, 57, 88, 139 theories of, 6, 31, 34−35, 71, 88 unconscious, 9, 67, 71, 87 use of term, 5–6 vitality affects. See Stern, Daniel Alberro, Alexander, 12, 13, 20, 27 Alloway, Lawrence, 42 Altieri, Charles, 4 definition of emotion, 5–6 analytic philosophy, 122, 169 Andre, Carl, 13, 41, 42, 137 anthropomorphism, 16, 21−28, 45, 69, 78, 87, 91, 94, 137−139 Antin, Eleanor, 122, 123 art abstract, 9, 10, 16, 41, 48, 50, 51, 52, 54, 69, 78 history of, 49, 52 affective dimensions, 1−11, 22, 30−35, 41, 49, 69, 84, 90, 93, 138, 139 affectless, 2, 8, 21, 32, 41, 42, 139 anaesthetic, 30, 114, 115, 120, 135 and expression, See expression and feminism, See feminist art and politics, 14, 33, 35, 106, 139 and subjectivity. See subjectivity anthropomorphism in. See anthropomorphism anti-aesthetic tradition, 1, 2, 7−8, 12, 14−16, 27, 113−114, 118, 121, 138−139, 172 as a living thing, 52, 53, 55, 58

187

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visualizing feeling

art – continued classical, 93 contemporary. See contemporary art criticism, 8, 15, 16, 22, 28, 39, 71, 119 critics, 1, 17, 35, 37, 42, 119, 172 as analysts, 35–36, 38 expressive theory of art. See expression function of, 15, 25 materials, 3, 12, 41, 48, 64, 89, 99, 109, 139 meaning of, 2, 4−5, 6−7, 13, 21−22, 25, 27−28, 32, 35, 63, 68, 84 methods, 3, 41, 63, 108 of the 1950s, 41, 56, 73, 119 of the 1960s, 68, 73 of the 1960s and 70s, 1, 3, 6, 48, 93, 107, 114, 138, 144 of the 1970s, 106 post-1960s, 8, 13, 34, 67 production of, 3, 8, 21, 28, 65, 67, 72, 90, 93, 117, 172 aestheticization. See aesthetics representation in, 23, 31, 35, 36, 40, 43−44, 73−74, 101, 103, 106, 121, 123, 134, 143, 144 self-representation, 11, 99 and the unrepresentable, 118, 124, 136 cross-cultural, 124 response to, 1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 12, 17, 18,20−22, 24, 26, 28, 31−33, 35, 39, 43, 45, 56, 63, 92, 107, 111−113, 121, 134−135, 149, 150, 153 ethics of reception, 116 twentieth century, 2, 27, 144−145 women's. See women’s art art history, 1, 3, 4, 14, 15, 24, 27, 43, 106, 107, 122, 145 and expression, 6, 12, 21, 32, 52 and psychoanalytic theory, 6, 7, 8, 30 art as psychical event, 8 psychobiographical approach, 8, 36, 72 art historians, 35, 36, 37, 170 role of, 8 feminist approaches to, 3, 106, 108, 114, 118−119, 138, 144−145, 149 late modern, 15 neglect of affect in, 39 neglect of feeling in , 1–4, 30 orthodoxy, 43

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art informel, 119 art practices, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 24, 28, 41, 43, 44, 49, 52, 55, 66, 100, 112, 118, 143 American post-war, 15 historical shifts in, 15, 17, 27 Artaud, Antonin, 2 arte povera, 52 artistic intention, 7, 12, 13, 19, 22, 28, 30, 35, 46, 67, 68, 93 negation of, 13, 19, 21, 30, 35, 67−68 artists, 1, 6, 36, 39, 42, 46, 49, 71,93,109−110, 116, 118−119, 121, 122, 123, 138, 143−145,149, 156, 172 myths about, 120, 138 subjectivity of, 55, 116, 139 Atkins, Robert, 11 avant-garde, 2, 5, 11 art, 2, 34, 124 female lineage, 2 literature, 2 of the 1920s and 30s, 52 of the 1960s, 52 practices, 3, 43, 52 standards, 3 Bachelard, Gaston rhythmanalysis, 58–59 Balint, Michael fragmentation in art, 74 Barrette, Bill, 76 Barry, Judith, 148 analysis of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 134 Barthes, Roland, 17, 108, 139, 149 colourless writing, 154 writing degree zero, 41 Bataille, Georges, 40 Battersby, Christine, 149 Baudry, Jean-Louis film as dream-like, 134 beauty, 14, 29, 31, 43, 52, 76, 106, 112, 113, 119, 135, 144 and truth. See Scarry, Elaine critical debates, 112–14 return to, 16 Beckley, Bill, 16 Benjamin, Walter, 113 Berger, Maurice, 71 Bill, Max, 56

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index

Bion, Wilfred part-objects, 73 Blocker, Jane, 147 Bochner, Mel, 108 Measurement Room, 108 body, the, 36, 45, 57, 58, 59, 61, 63, 65, 66, 69, 71, 73, 78, 93, 99, 103, 105, 109, 112, 114, 122, 139, 140, 143, 159, 164 and affect, 37, 69, 112, 160 and feeling, 48, 65, 139 collective. See Clark, Lygia crying, 110–11 female, 10, 94, 101, 106, 123, 144 fragmentation in modern art, 73–74 gesture, 64, 93, 106 in participatory art, 9, 47, 57 revitalization of. See Clark, Lygia therapy. See Clark, Lygia Bois, Yve-Alain, 9, 49, 52, 59, 72, 76, 117, 156 critique of Eva Hesse, bodily allusion in, 84 repetition in, 74 disappearance in the work of Lygia Clark, 139 Bollas, Christopher:, 65 Bond, Katherine Russell, 135 Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel, 105 Bourgeois, Louise, 73 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 171 Brecht, Bertolt, 120 alienation effect, 118, 120−121, 123, 168, 169 empathy vs. feeling, 121 Brett, Guy, 60, 93, 107, 159 Brisley, Stuart, 110 British Art & Language group, 122 Buchloh, Benjamin, 108, 114 Bürger, Peter, 51 Burgin, Victor, 123 Butler, Judith performativity, 10, 106 Camnitzer, Luis, 99, 107 Caruth, Cathy, 170 Casey, Edward, 6, 32 aesthetics of the work, 22 on expression, 6–7, 21–22, 32, 84 Cézanne, Paul, 47

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189

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung, 2, 9, 11, 107, 116−136, 138, 143, 144,148,167 affective tone in artworks, 118, 120, 128, 135 and feeling, 11, 120−121, 135−136,138, 144 and the untransmittable, 124, 133, 136 and the sublime, 136,144 Apparatus, 124 critical reception, 2, 11, 107, 122–23 decentred subject,11, 123−124,144 Dictée, 122, 124, 134 displacement, 118, 135 dream motif, 117, 133, 134−5, 144 Exilée, 125 ideal of shared communication, 120 impersonality, 116, 118, 120, 134, 136 investigtions into language, 118, 122, 125, 126−128, 144 Mouth to Mouth, 130–31 Passages, Paysages, 117, 123, 125−136 Permutations, 130–31 realization of theory in practice, 124 Videodème, 126–28 Chang, Juliana, 116 Chave, Anna, 68, 148 vividness of associations in the work of Eva Hesse, 86 Clark, Lygia, 2, 9, 46−66, 107, 119, 138, 140, 142, 143, 155, 156, 157, 159 and the body as an instrument for expression, 48, 52 collective, 48, 63 therapy, 155 body-to-body relationship to art, 54 Air and Stone, 58 art as a living thing, 52, 53, 55, 58 Beasts, 53–55, 157 Biological Architecture Birth, 64 Cannibalism, 65, 159 Cannibalistic Slobber, 65 critical reception, 9, 52, 54−55, 57−58, 139 fantasmic experience, 140 final works, 48, 65–66 geometric abstraction in artworks, 9, 48, 51, 52, 54, 56 infinite tissue, 63, 159 organic line, 50 parallels with minimalism, 50–52, 156

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Clark, Lygia – continued participatory art, 9, 47, 48, 53, 55, 139, 156–57 rejection of the spectator, 9, 66, 156 revitalization, 48 rhythm, 58 sculpture, 54, 55 Sensorial Hoods, 60–61 The Body is the House, 63 The House is the Body, 59–60, 63 The I and the You, 61–63 therapeutic intent, 49, 65–66, 140, 155 Trailings, 55–57 use of startle and surprise, 47, 57 Clark, T.J., 119 class, 21, 119 Colpitt, Frances, 42 conceptual art, 1, 9, 11, 12, 30, 41, 55, 94, 107, 108, 120, 144, 170, 172 anti-aesthetic, 114 anti-expressive, 110, 111, 121 do-it-yourself aesthetic in, 109 emotion in, 94 influence of analytic philosophy, 169 romantic conceptualism. See Ader, Bas Jan San Francisco accounts of, 122, 125 seriality, 110, 108–10, 116 as means of suppressing subjectivity and feeling, 109 unity with minimalism, 109 use of photography in, 114 constructivism, 49, 54, 55, 56 contemporary art, 15, 16, 18, 39, 66, 144, 152, 172 Copjec, Joan attention to the inarticulable in art, 68 Cultural Studies, 4 culture, 90, 92, 124, 134 ancient, 100, 143 conventions in, 123 modern, 41 production of, 38, 68 de Duve, Thierry, 8, 12, 13, 15, 16, 21, 22, 28, 39 critique of minimalism, 139 temporal dimension of 22−23 minimalist anthropomorphism, 23–26 on history of contemporary art, 152

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on subjectivity, 12–14, 66 parallelism, 34, 36 performativity, 26, 27 reprise of Hegelian aesthetics, 18 de Zegher, Catherine, 2−3, 146 death drive, the, 41 Deleuze, Gilles, 32, 147 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 138 Deutsche, Rosalyn, 33 Dewey, John, 32 Difference: on Representation and Sexuality, 123 Duchamp, Marcel, 12, 40, 114 readymade art, 29−30, 120 Dufrenne, Mikel, 32 Edelson, Mary Beth, 100 embodiment, 21, 37, 43 emotion, 4, 5, 69, 87, 92, 94, 112, 120, 121, 125, 138, 145 ambiguity, 115 gendering of, 4, 11 theories of, 4, 73, 88 empathy theory, 30 ethnicity, 11, 143 experience, 1, 6, 11, 18, 19, 21, 23, 25, 45, 50, 55, 59, 60, 61, 118, 124, 134, 136, 139, 151, 167 aesthetic experience, 14, 17, 46, 47, 84 and feeling, 29 bodily, 47 perception, 19, 21, 39, 45, 46, 47, 52, 57, 125, 133, 139, 144 pleasure, 14, 16, 31, 42, 43, 45, 125, 144 in rhythm, 58 of bonding and binding, 63 visual, 121 sensation, 5, 56, 61, 65, 144 bodily, 47, 48 inner and outer, 24, 61 sensuousness, 13, 14, 16 expression, 6–7, 12, 14, 17, 28, 32, 35, 40, 46, 48, 50, 52, 61, 67, 68, 93, 108, 110, 112, 114 as a phenomenon of art, 21–22, 32 cohesiveness in, 6, 10 expressive theory of art, 4, 6, 13, 17, 19, 21, 28, 32, 34, 40, 109, 119, 138 rejection of, 67–68, 116, 118, 138 privacy of. See Krauss, Rosalind

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index

faces, 37, 111 facial expression, 111, 112 Farver, Jane, 107 feeling, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 12, 21, 24, 29, 30, 32, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 57, 58, 61, 63, 65, 69, 71, 74, 84, 88, 89, 90, 92, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 120, 136, 138, 139, 144, 145, 152 ambiguity, 10, 48 and subjectivity in art, 14, 120 as bodily sensation and emotion, 48 communicative function, 30, 39 gendering of, 4, 11 miniaturization. See Tomkins, Silvan revitalization. See Clark, Lygia feminine, 2, 3, 4, 11, 146 feminine genius. See Kristeva, Julia femininity, 4, 106 feminism, 82, 134, 138, 145 theory, 3, 4 strategic essentialism, 4, 146 feminist art and identity, 123 and new models for subjectivity. See subjectivity of the 1970s and 80s, 118, 138 postmodern deflation in. See Iverson, Margaret practices, 3, 82, 106, 118, 119, 123 Fer, Briony, 10, 68, 69, 72 blankness in the work of Eva Hesse, 69 film, 9, 10, 93, 95, 100, 101, 109, 118,122, 125 film theory, 121, 131, 134 alienation, 118 French, 124 history, 131 historians, 170 structural, 1, 130−131, 170 anti-expressiveness of, 121 Brechtian alienation. See Brecht, Bertolt Flavin, Dan, 41 Fluxus, 16, 52 formalism, 7,35, 119 Foster, Hal, 17, 21, 152 Foucault, Michel, 137–38 Frank, Adam, 88 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 9, 42, 87 affect versus representation, 44

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191

anxiety, 30–31 consciousness of affect, 88 French Freudianism, 118 interpretation vs. construction, 36 kettle logic, 42, 154 limits of construction with artworks, 37 on affect, 9–10, 31, 44 on beauty, 29 on jokes, 90, 127 on pleasure, 113 on oneness with the earth, 103–4 on rhythm, 58 primary identification, 105, 164–65 psychobiographical approach to art. See art history sublimation, 90 Fried, Michael, 17, 22, 23, 150 critique of minimalism, 17, 23–25, 27, 32, 42, 73, 156 temporality of art, 167 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 17, 32 radical subjectivization, 17 Gego (Gertrude Goldschmidt) 2 gender, 11, 73, 100, 106, 123, 143 Godfrey, Mark, 109, 110, 166 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 61 Green, André, 6, 43, 46, 88 affect and representation, 31, 44 affect as anticipation, 31, 45, 46 affect, the body, and language, 31 Greenberg, Clement, 152 Griggs, Russell, 127 Guattari, Félix, 32, 147 Gullar, Ferreira, 49, 156 non-objects, 52, 157 Haacke, Hans, 32−33, 35, 110 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 15 Idealist aesthetics, 18 Heidegger, Martin, 26 Heiser, Jörg romantic conceptualism, 94, 166 Hemmings, Clare, 4 Herkenhoff, Paulo, 156, 157

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192

visualizing feeling

Hesse, Eva, 2, 9−10, 67−91, 138, 139,140, 141,143, 147, 159, 160, 163 absurdity in work, 74–76, 90−91 affective tone of artworks, 10, 69, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82, 84, 87, 89, 90 alignment with minimalism, 10, 67, 140 and unconscious affect, 9, 91, 143 anthropomorphism in, 69, 78, 87, 91 Accession series, 140 biography, 72, 90 Contingent, 87 contradictory associations in work, 10, 69–71,74, 82, 86, 89, 143 critical reception, 10, 67−69, 71−72, 74, 81−83, 86−87, 143 expressiveness, 10, 67−69, 90, 140 geometric quality of work, 81, 91 Hang Up, 74–77 Ingeminate, 78–81 repetition in, 74 Repetition Nineteen III, 77–84 sculpture, 67, 69 seriality in, 82, 84 similarity to work of Lygia Clark, 140 Several, 78–81 Tori, 82–84 Untitled or Not Yet, 140 viewer’s affective response to, 72, 78, 82, 88, 90 Hinshelwood, R.D., 151 part-objects, 73 identity, 11, 123, 124, 134, 143 as a construct, 123 gender, 11, 143 intercultural, 107, 143 performative, 10, 106 politics, 106 relational, 99, 143 Inside the Visible, 2 installation art, 24, 27 video, 27 Iverson, Margaret critique of the sublime, 118–20 deflationary impulse in feminist art, 118–20, 138 Jameson, Fredric waning of affect, 40

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Jay, Martin critique of modernist excision of feeling, 40–41 Jena Romanticism, 15 Johns, Jasper, 41, 154 Jonas, Joan, 122, 131 Joyce, James, 2 Judd, Donald, 12, 108, 150 critique of Lygia Clark, 53–55 “one thing after another”, 12, 108 specific objects, 52 Kant, Immanuel, 15, 20, 23, 26, 31, 39 sublime, the, 124−125 taste, 17, 39, 120, 128, 149, 152 thing-in-itself, the, 46 transcendental aesthetics, 19, 31,120, 124, 128, 149, 150, 151, 152, 166 Kelly, Mary, 123 kinetic art, 9, 54 Klein, Melanie, 6, 24, 89, 146, 151 object relations, 48, 73 part-objects, 72, 74 oral phantasies of infancy, 65, 73, 159 Klein, Yves, 107 critique of art informel, 119 Kofman, Sarah, 36, 37, 38 universality of affective response, 38–39 Kolbowski, Silvia, 123 Kosuth, Joseph, 122 Kozloff, Max zombie art, 42, 139 Krauss, Rosalind, 7, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20, 21, 22, 27, 28, 68, 151 critique of Eva Hesse, 10, 67, 143 phenomenological account of subjectivity, 13–14, 18–20, 22, 26 privacy of expression, 21−22, 25, 68, 143 Kristeva, Julia, 2−3 feminine genius, 146 Kruger, Barbara, 123 Kwon, Miwon, 147, 172 Lacan, Jacques, 6, 44, 124 dreams, 134 “lalangue”, 127 land art, 1, 52 Langer, Susanne, 32, 50, 58

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index

language, 21, 44, 123, 134, 144 and affect, 31 displacement of the subject by, 118 Laplanche, Jean trauma, 135 late modern art, 1, 3, 9, 14, 15, 39, 40, 108, 118, 138 affective response to, 43 affectless, 8, 21 anaesthetic sensibility in, 41 and expression, 138 and feeling, 30, 42 and subjectivity, 14, 27, 138 anti-aesthetic, 1, 14, 15, 138, 172 anti-expressive, 1, 25, 35, 67, 116 anti-subjective, 1, 40 avant-garde practices, 2 ethic of impersonality, 116, 117 other-oriented, 116–17 Lee, Min Jung critique of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha communication in, 124 subjectivity in, 133–34 Levinas, Emmanuel, 138 ethics, 117, 167 Levine, Sherrie, 123 LeWitt, Sol, 40, 73, 106, 108 de-emphasis on materials in art production, 109−110 Linker, Kate, 123 Lippard, Lucy, 10, 69, 100, 147 critique of Eva Hesse animation in, 71–72 contradiction in, 86 eccentric abstraction in, 82, 87 humour as incongruity, 76 Lyotard, Jean-François on avant-garde art, 124 sublime, the, 118–19, 124 summary of psychoanalytic approaches to art, 36 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 2, 128 Manet, Edouard, 40 Marker, Chris, 128, 170 Markus, Gyorgy, 35, 149 aesthetic schema, 15 Matte-Blanco, Ignacio, 6

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193

affect and the unconscious, 10, 71, 88, 89, 91 memories in feelings, 89 Matthis, Iréne, 5 McDougall, Joyce, 6, 45 elements of psychic structure, 34 Medalla, David on Lygia Clark’s Beasts, 53–55 Mendieta, Ana, 2, 9−11, 92−115, 138, 139, 143, 144, 163 accusations of essentialism, 10–11, 106 affective tone, 94, 99, 105, 110, 111, 114, 115, 163−164 and conceptual art, 94, 107, 112, 114, 115 Birth in Mud, 101–3 blankness of figures, 99 and colonization, 143 contradictory qualities of work, 93 critical reception, 11, 106–10, 114, 164 disappearance of the body, 95 earthbody sculptures, 93, 94 relations of body and earth, 10, 94−100, 103, 104, 105, 109 expressiveness, 93, 107, 111, 114, 115 links to minimalism, 1–2 miniaturization of feeling, 112 objectification in, 99 on Mother Earth, 11 relational identity, 143 serial method, 77–84, 107, 109 Silueta Series, 10, 92, 93, 115, 143 means of addressing viewers, 99 poses, 100 territorial impulse, 100 themes, 94, 101 disappearance of the body, 95–100 Merewether, Charles, 163 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 18, 21, 52, 138 intertwining of body and the world, 44, 56, 57, 63, 159 primordial perception, 47, 48 primordial spatiality, 20, 23 Messager, Annette, 2 Meyer, James, 148, 150, 152, 172 Michelson, Annette, 73 Milliet, Maria Alice, 56 Min, Yong Soon, 135

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visualizing feeling

minimalism, 1–2, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 27, 30, 34, 39, 46, 50, 52, 67, 108, 109, 111, 112, 120, 144, 156, 172 affective response to, 43, 44 affectlessness, 32, 41, 42, 44, 45, 46, 109 aggressiveness of, 1, 24, 27, 32, 33, 42, 43, 45, 73 and aesthetics, 14–18 and dismantling subjectivity, 7, 12–13 and phenomenology, 7–8 anthropomophism in, 23–26, 138 blankness in, 45, 46 boredom in, 2, 42, 43, 45 contingency, 20–21, 26 early critical response, 41–42 entanglement of beholder and works of art, 8, 24, 28, 138, 156 geometric abstraction, 19, 22–23, 110 industrial logic, 12 industrial materials, 12, 41 new model for subjectivity. See subjectivity phenomenological readings. See Krauss, Rosalind; de Duve, Thierry repositioning of affect, 46 sculptural works, 18, 23, 24, 32 suppression of expression, 7, 17, 67, 121 temporal dimensions, 22–23 Mitchell, Juliet, 73 modern art, 1 anaesthetic sensibility, 40 impersonal urge in, 117, 120 modernism, 65, 93, 119 Molesworth, Helen, 109 Morris, Robert, 12, 16, 18, 22, 50, 77, 150, 151 aesthetic dispersion, 12−13, 22 Mulvey, Laura critique of visual pleasure, 121 nature, 10, 92, 94, 99, 125, 143 earth, 10, 92, 93, 94, 95, 103, 143 feminization of, 93, 106 landscape, 11, 93, 94, 99, 109, 125 Mother Earth, 10–11 Mother Nature, 101 relationship with the body. See Mendieta, Ana seasons, 94 neo-concretism, 9, 48, 49, 57

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manifesto, 49–50, 52, 66, 156 Neo-Dada, 16 neo-expressionism, 119 Nixon, Mignon fragmentation in the work of Eva Hesse, 73 Oiticia, Hélio, 57, 61, 140 painting, 9, 13, 40, 41, 42, 50, 51, 52, 67, 76, 86,119, 128, 133 participatory art, 9, 47−48, 54, 139, 171 Pedrosa, Mario, 57, 156 performance art, 9, 37, 114, 122 performativity, 10, 26 Perrault, John, 107 phenomenology, 8, 13, 18, 26, 43, 45, 49, 52, 148 photography, 9, 10, 33, 93, 100, 101, 107, 108, 109, 113, 114, 128, 133 in minimalist art. See minimalism Photography and Language group, 122 Piper, Adrian, 122 Pollock, Griselda emancipatory pleasures, 121 Pop art, 16 postmodern art, 124 deflationary impulse in, 118 postmodernism, 20, 21, 22 theory, 124 poststructuralism, 30 Potts, Alex, 149 Proust, Marcel, 128, 132 psychoanalytic practice, 30, 34, 36, 49, 89 and affect, 34–35 psychoanalytic theory, 5, 6, 24, 29, 40, 48, 49, 122 and affect, 5, 6, 7, 9−10, 31, 34−35, 40, 41, 43, 44, 45−46, 48−49, 58, 59,71, 88−89, 91,111, 113, 139 and feeling, 29−33, 34, 88−89 and unconscious affect, 9−10, 71, 87−91 application in art history. See art history dreams, 127, 135 identification, 105, 121, 164−165 introjection, 82 limits of reason, 124 object relations, 48 depressive position, 73 paranoid-schizoid position, 24, 73

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index

psychoanalytic theory – continued part-objects, 24, 72, 91 transitional objects, 59 projection, 73, 159 sublimation, 90 transference, 34, 37, 38, 39, 44, 89 counter-transference, 65 trauma, 135–36 unconscious, the, 10, 37, 44, 68, 71, 76, 87, 116, 127, 134, 136, 143, 144 race, 11, 21, 143 Ramirez, Mari Carmen, 172 religion, 59, 92, 103 representation, 23, 31, 35, 36, 40, 144 and affect, 43, 44 critical debates, 143 Rinder, Lawrence, 127 Rolnik, Suely, 57, 155 Rose, Barbara, 41, 45 Rosler, Martha, 122, 123 Roth, Moira aesthetics of indifference, 41 Rubin, William transformation of negative affect through artworks, 42 Ruscha, Ed Every Building on Sunset Strip, 108 Sabbatino, Mary, 93 Scarry, Elaine beauty and truth, 113 Schneemann, Carolee, 100 sculpture, 9, 10, 22, 52, 54, 56, 57, 67, 69, 72, 76, 143 ancient, 100 constructivist, 55 minimalist, 18, 23, 24, 32 post-1960s, 13, 67 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 88 Sekula, Allan, 33, 114 Sitney, Adams, 170 Smith, Tony, 24, 25 Smithson, Robert, 39 Solomon-Godeau, Abigail, 123 Spector, Jack, 36 Spector, Nancy, 93, 114 Spivak, Gayatri

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195

strategic essentialism, 146 Stein, Ruth, 6 Steinberg, Leo ascetic passion, 41, 154 on Jasper Johns, 154 Stella, Frank, 13 Stern, Daniel, 6 vitality affects, 9, 48, 58 strategic essentialism, 4, 146 subjectivity, 8, 12, 14, 16, 25−28, 35, 40, 55, 116, 122, 123, 139, 144, 150 and trauma, 135−136 as a construct, 144 contemporary state, 18, 25, 27, 66,139 contingent, 20 elimination of, 12−13, 117 female, 11 models of, 7−8, 13−14, 19, 25, 26, 143 postmodern, 123 suppression of, 7−8, 40, 108−109 surrealism, 8, 71, 76 taste, 14, 17, 29, 30, 39, 40, 119,120, 149,152 technology, 101 Tomkins, Silvan, 6, 43, 153 affect theory, 48, 88, 111, 113 affect miniaturization, 111–12 maximizing positive affect, 45 negative affects, 88 positive affects, 88 resetting affects, 48, 57, 88 claustral joy, 63, 105, 139 claustrophobic wishes, 159 desire for remedial action, 111 startle and surprise, 43 Vicuña, Cecilia, 2 Verwoert, Jan, 110 video, 9, 27, 118, 122, 125, 126, 131, 144 Viso, Olga, 100, 107 Wagner, Anne, 69 imagery in work of Eva Hesse, 72 on contradictory critiques of Eva Hesse, 86 Warburg, Aby, 30 Weiss, Rachel, 107 Wilson, William critique of works of Eva Hesse, 82

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Winnicott, Donald, 6 art as intermediary in experience, 59 unintegration, 61, 139 vitality, 48, 59, 139 Wollen, Peter, 170 women artists, 2, 3, 4, 5, 119, 122, 144−145 contributions, 11, 122, 138, 144−145 women’s art, 2, 3, 114, 122, 146 avant-garde practices. See avant-garde challenge to art history, 114–15

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innovations of, 2−3, 139, 143, 144−145 Woodman, Francesca, 2 Woolf, Susan, 170 Worringer, Wilhelm urge toward abstraction in art, 41 Zelevansky, Lynn, 172 Zimmer, William, 164 Zizek, Slavoj, 150

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