THE DARK REGISTER 2024

Starting with the letter “f”, both fur & fetish have a relationship that is in excess of a love of fur. Where does a love of fur go when we recognise our drooling reflection in the window of Barnados “Furriers” (what a strange rarefied word) at the bottom of Grafton Street, but feel we can’t act on it? Well, they say, psychoanalysts, that such disavowal, fetishistic in its denial, finds another object. Slavoj Zizek uses his friend’s excessive love of a furry hamster after his wife’s passing as an example of fetishistic disavowal. I locate my sudden interest in Barnardos’ Furriers to a lack of something in the art scene. I even suggested, half-jokingly, to my psychoanalysis & art students, a field trip to the furriers because there was nothing else on. We got as far as the window, where a furry Santa, fur baubles, gold price tags & a woman in furs beckoned us in.

We never get to go dreamy… david lynch rage rage against the dying of the light.

[from nosubject.com] The moebius strip is one of the figures studied by Lacan in his use of topology. It is a three-dimensional figure that can be formed by taking a long rectangle of paper and twisting it once before joining its ends together. The result is a figure which subverts our normal (Euclidean) way of representing space, for it seems to have two sides but in fact has only one. Locally, at any one point, two sides can be clearly distinguished, but when the whole strip is traversed it becomes clear that they are in fact continuous.The two sides are only distinguished by the dimension of time, the time it takes to traverse the whole strip.

The figure illustrates the way that psychoanalysis problematizes various binary oppositions, such as inside/outside, love/hate, signifier/signified, truth/appearance. While the two terms in such oppositions are often presented as radically distinct, Lacan prefers to understand these oppositions in terms of the topology of the moebius strip. The opposed terms are thus seen to be not discrete but continuous with each other. Likewise, the discourse of the master is continuous with the discourse of the analyst.

The moebius strip also helps one to understand how it is possible to “traverse the fantasy. It is only because the two sides are continuous that it is possible to cross over from inside to outside. Yet, when one passes a finger round the surface of the moebius strip, it is impossible to say at which precise point one has crossed over from “inside” to “outside” (or vice versa).

“You know that something that is excluded from the content returns as a form.” Zizek on Freud’s interpretation of form and content in dreams.

luc tuymans dreaming in the studio…

Jeff Wall, The Flooded Grave, 1998-2000, transparency in lightbox, 90 x 111 in.

THE CURRENT exhibition at the Photo Museum Dublin “Skin/Deep Perspectives on the Body” is obviously an exhibition of photographs. This description is not an exercise in tautology, but really an effort to get to the essence of what photography is as a medium, and what this exhibition says about photography: a fetishistic mode of cultural production that is particular, specific and still its own thing in relation to other modes of cultural production: The “Photo (not painting or art) Museum” is a case in point.

The fetish, something that defines specificity in cultural production better than most theoretical frameworks or objects, is a way of describing, not pathologizing, how the artist disavows, selects and edits their focus in a world of too many things to focus on. The photographer is the fetishist par excellence among a cast of pretenders, including painters and sculptors and even filmmakers.

The fetishist is someone who brings specificity and a detached directness to their gaze via the instantaneous gaze and production of the camera. Analogue or digital, the uncanny mechanics of the camera always implies the past with the implication of dust on the lens, on the LCD screen, on the negative, or on the positive print. The photographer is alive to the present, even if the resulting apparition of the photograph can only document that lively present as an object that represents the past.

The camera itself cradles the photographer’s vision in its gaze, making one eye from two. Being a photographer is about tapping into this singularity, about being a brutal editor of the world. Art is a process of demarcation, of drawing a line and limit. Being an artist is about extracting a part from the whole, so the whole world can be invoked in that part. The true poet performs this sieving of superfluous material to fetishistic singularity with words; the true artist does this with everything else.

Specificity (in photography) is a fetishistic and territorial trait of the medium. Significantly, it is the detail that first dilates and then contracts the photographer’s pupil, what Roland Barthes named the punctum: “the incidental but personally poignant detail in a photograph which ‘pierces’ or ‘pricks’ a particular viewer, constituting a private meaning unrelated to any cultural code.” This can be read in many ways, the way the philosophical avant garde liked it. Yet “detail” and “private” seem to signify the photographer and photography best.

The Photo Museum's architecture and geographical placement — off the cobbled streets of Temple Bar — also compound this feeling of detail and privacy, especially in relation to this exhibition and experience. With my 6.6 bulk, I always feel like Gulliver (or Gregor Schneider) on entering the building. But I imagine that this is most visitors’ experience. It feels like the architect burgled a collection of cubby holes from an array of grand buildings and stuck them together, up-down, this way, that. Even the arc of rail that tracks across the main space for the secret moveable wall creates a fissure in the imagination of reduction over expansion. This is not a criticism of the architecture. That said this is not a space to install paintings or sculpture or even film. This is a space made for photography.

And yet it is the photographs on display here, and the specificity of their collective gaze on the body, is what brings the architecture into focus, and manifests photography as an unadulterated medium. Photographs that host the body in parts, in articulation, in relation, in mysticism, in transition, in transaction, in exhibition, in reflection, in colour, in collapse, in collage—looking, looking, looking/ editing, editing, editing/ cutting, cutting, cutting, and how that looking, editing and cutting is displayed in a particular dimension, quantity and arrangement on the walls of the gallery. It’s a lot to distill for photographer, curator and observer.

Some twenty years ago I came across the term “objet petit a” invented by Jacques Lacan. I didn't get it. I read a few papers. I didn't get it. I left it for a few years until Lacanian philosopher Slavoj Žižek explained it to me through some popular cultural references. I didn't get it. I looked up the blunt definition “object cause of desire” & thought I got it. I didn’t. Retrospectively the objet petit a had become my objet petit a, the very obstacle to my desire for meaning, an obstacle I was unconsciously enjoying. Enter David Lynch. Last night I watched Part 15 of Twin Peaks: The Return, which revisits the original series televised & set 25 years previous, a series I watched on some snowy channel in my adolescence, an adolescence spent in a village with a hotel situated by a waterfall, surrounded by woodlands & a village sign with a population listed less than the original 5,201 of Twin Peaks. During those school days I gazed, listless, out the school bus window with Twin Peaks' tender theme song & its abject abstractions imprinted on my squishy teenage brain. I was Haunted. Still am. The best episode so far, Part 15, blends the old Twin Peaks (innocence amidst the possibility of terror) with the new Twin Peaks (terror amidst the possibility of innocence). Diner owner Norma & gas station owner Ed—the couple who never became official but edge the precipice of its possibility for two lifetimes in TV hours—finally overcome the ultimate pretext & obstacle to their desire, their objet petit a: Nadine. Let me explain. Ed is married to patch-eyed & mentally disturbed Nadine. For a brief interlude in the original series Ed & Norma get together when thirty-something Nadine loses her memory to regress into a teenager in the possession of superhuman strength. Everyone is ‘happy’ until Nadine's memory returns in the concluding episode. In The Return, Nadine confronts Ed at his gas station with a golden shovel (long story) & releases him from his marital obligations. A gawky Ed rushes to the diner, waves & strides towards Norma to tell her in his country & western timbre that he is free, they are free. Norma snubs him momentarily by continuing with a business appointment in a booth at the far end of the diner with a man that Ed suspects is also a love interest. Ed— a still reed in a storm—orders a coffee, takes a seat at the counter after a few sidelong glances with Norma that reciprocate disappointment, to then slip into a thousand yard stare. Closing his eyes to inhale & hold the seconds, Ed braces against the suspended moment when Norma will either reject or accept him. Same again Sam. The objet petit a is not the object of desire (Norma or Ed) but the delay & suspension of attaining the object of desire. They are entangled, desire & its obstacle, fusing as surplus enjoyment. Ed's freedom from Nadine immediately finds its substitute in another ad hoc objet petit a—anything to prolong the obstacle & object cause of their desire, a desire that will become void alone. This scene, although it has the elements of what could turn into the dogma of a Hollywood embrace overseen by the cheers of an overenthusiastic crowd, is anything but. Norma & Ed finally seal the union with a kiss, somewhat ironically to Ottis Redding’s I've Been Loving You Too Long after dancing too long to Jim Morrison's lyric I've got this girl beside me, but she's out of reach. I give them 6-months. Tops. 

To sleep or not sleep on a painting? Imagine a room full of paintings. It can be any room: a white cube, a cellar, with a bed. Paintings pack the walls. Every bit of wall space is squeezed to an inch of its life. If a wall is part of the world, then what is a wall full of paintings? Is a painting just playing pretend? A cover up? In more ways than one! What we know is, a painting is a thing made up of its becoming a thing. To assume a painting is unfinished is missing the point of its intrinsic and existential becoming. A painting is composed, constructed, built, layered to become a thing that is becoming a thing. A painting’s end is arbitrary and necessary. A #wip is a tautology. A painting is always becoming. How far it becomes is up to the painter. The way in which it becomes is also up to the painter. The becoming always starts slow, a struggle to become the thing it is becoming. Colour here, tone there, heavy, light, transparent, a drip caught dropping. Painting becomes its becoming. A good painting is information dispensed in different directions, thicknesses, tones, colours, awkward adjustments towards a thing becoming without ever becoming the thing. A painting is not a wall; a painting conceals a wall; a wall being the world, a painting being… temporary. The painter stops. Why? Who knows. The painter could have kept going. Maybe painting is the transformation of time into H x W x L. Why is a novel the length it becomes? Culture has a length, a limit, a breadth. Words & music could go on forever, but culture has to become a thing that never becomes. Paintings are becoming things. That’s their thing. Becoming. Upon waking Forrest Bess painted his visions without gratuitous flourishes. He was a pragmatic visionary. He was not a dreamer. Luc Tuymans never sleeps on a painting. His paintings become a thing infinitely becoming in a day — no more, no less. 8 hours of interposed sleep would only torment the real time it took for his paintings to become something that is becoming. This seems reasonable, realistic, real. In the end painting becomes its becoming. But what is a painting that ends in the pursuit of becoming? Are Tuymans’s paintings still becoming when the painter sleeps? Does he wake to see them anew, perfect? Or does the painter merely tolerate them, like other people that can’t be moulded to our liking? Paintings are subjects not objects no matter what the cover story of the art market says. We could pass the buck & say the viewer finishes off the painting; the painting’s elan vital is the viewer jerking off in front of the painting after all the edging towards becoming has been done by the painter. Painting is maturbation. Painting is durational. Paintings are not like Michael Heizer’s City or Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. Paintings, in their becoming, have a lifespan. What we are presented with in a painting is something that represents time & becoming. Paintings are small fires, small lives. Some of Frank Auerbach and Howard Hodgkin’s paintings may span the lifespan of an adolescent in numbers, but they took the time it takes a paint-leaden brush to swipe across a canvas. Painters don’t dream.

Nine photographers in total inhabit the main space of the Photo Museum with its attendant cobbyholes and corridors and anterooms. It is difficult to discern among the cast of individual photographers and their collective focus on the bit-parts of the body: Lacan’s full body mirror stage is definitely fractured here, which is probably a good thing considering the outcome of such specular identification. The mood however is definitely low-level dark register, except perhaps for Padraig Spillane’s—elevated in architecture and register—corporate sensibility that collages Bauhausian planar colour with a Pierre Molinier eye for design.

Yet the Molinier reference may be the influence of what is taking place below in the basement, in the cut and cropped bodies that come out of the shadows of their personal walk-in closets or cubby holes. There’s punctums all around here, not just in the photographs themselves, but, on my watch with a group of psychoanalysis and art students, the relationship between the architecture and the observer’s confrontation with the photographs. Each pocket of space feels like you are crossing the private threshold into that walk-in closet of what Diane Arbus called a “secret about a secret”, and what Adam Philips called—using Arbus as a foil—“the best definition of the unconscious”.

Brian Teeling and Vera Ryklova, having the advantage of their own walk-in closets, portray their own secret bodies in the dark and light of day respectively. They are an inversion of Yin (dark, feminine) and Yang (light, masculine) in their exploration and exposure of self. Brian’s room is adolescent in respect to the clutter and the kicking off of sock and jocks represented in an underfoot rug. Uncanny smells are exorcised from the deep past in the darkroom red haze of his representation of self, partial and gradual. Vera’s room is straight with raw presence, an expanded photo booth making me feel less Gulliver under her exposure and heft of her gaze and posturing. A fellow photographer summoned PJ Harvey in his admiration of Vera’s walk-in scenario. I concurred with Rid of Me (PJ Harvey’s first album with the iconic image of the singer whiplashing her wet hair in the bathtub), and an ironic slogan for an exhibition of me’s and not me’s.

My observations may sound calculated and cold, placing a focus on form over feeling, yet it is the form that is doing all the work here, including releasing the feeling that are already implicit in the gaze of the photograph and photographer, even when that love is lost or displaced in the case of the fetishist, or love-lost or desired and needing to be found. 

"I dreamt that it was night and that I was lying in my bed. (My bed stood with its foot towards the window; in front of the window there was a row of old walnut trees. I know it was winter when I had the dream, and night-time.) Suddenly the window opened of its own accord, and I was terrified to see that some white wolves were sitting on the big walnut tree in front of the window. There were six or seven of them. The wolves were quite white, and looked more like foxes or sheep-dogs, for they had big tails like foxes and they had their ears pricked like dogs when they are attending to something. In great terror, evidently of being eaten up by the wolves, I screamed and woke up.” (Sigmund Freud [I918], "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis," in Three Case Histories.)

"It's not a feminist act for an 18 year old woman to photograph herself with wooden clothespins clipped onto her naked breasts, groin and torso. It's not an anti-feminist act either. It could be a mortification of the flesh inspired by some of the gory religious paintings the young artist saw during her family's museum outings in Italy… or a retake from a BDSM magazine… or a joke… or a search for sensation...” Chris Kraus on Francesca Woodman's Untitled (Boulder Colorado)” 1976.

It’s no surprise that Chris Kraus wrote about this photograph by Woodman, because it sits outside the artist’s well known vernacular of Victorianna attic-girl swishing around behind furniture & mirrors. I think Kraus is interested in this image because it destabilises the commodified image of Woodman, an identity that is multiple not singular, like all artists. The problem is, when an artist becomes known for one thing over many things they have already become commodified. Galleries commodify. Instagram commodifies. And this has nothing to do with money, but with image, & ultimately identity.

The relationship between Psychoanalysis & Art is intense if you bring yourself emotionally, not just intellectually, to contemporary art forms that touch what I call the “dark register”. Psychoanalytic theory leans into the more intimate & emotional spaces of art & artists who approach the dark register, whereas philosophy represses death & emotion so it can be a theory in itself. “In psychoanalysis you get an insight into a crack, gap, distance, that philosophy has to repress.” (Zizek) That is why psychoanalysis, as a theory, has to be in a relationship with something else to exist, to be alive.

I believe the biggest threat to art is its commodification under the self-conscious mediation of images, & also the conditioning that such mediation incurs; a mediation that is so image conscious that any possibility of risk, permissibility, or going off script under the public’s gaze is sacrificed for consistency, repetition, routine & a stable art identity.

Untitled 2003 was initiated in 2002 when Andrea Fraser approached Friedrich Petzel Gallery to arrange a commission with a private collector on her behalf. The requirements for the commission included a sexual encounter between Fraser & a collector, which would be recorded on videotape to be produced as a DVD in an edition of five, with the first exemplar of the edition going to the participating collector. The resulting videotape is a silent, unedited sixty-minute document shot in a hotel room with a stationary camera & existing lighting.

Fraser thought about becoming a psychoanalyst after she was commissioned to stage and perform Untitled in 2002, but she got a teaching job which saved her from buying a couch for other people to lie on. Untitled is a strange work, one that claims but sits outside of Institutional Critique (IC), which was always a meta critique of the art institutions that housed it anyway, an injoke for the gatekeepers. Untitled is not so much an injoke, but something niche & risky, which is very unlike the admin aesthetic of IC. I’m a big admirer of how Fraser articulates the artworld - she made me become aware of institutions, the institutionalised artworld, artist, & the contradictions therein. I discovered Untitled much later, which floored me at first, then filled me with questions. Fraser’s Untitled made the New York Times based on the popular & unpopular reception to the 60-minute artwork, a misogynist article that ramped up the spectacle of sex, lies & video tape. Fraser had to warn her parents before the NYT article came out in print, an article her mother hated so much that I wonder if her anger was misdirected. I think when artists talk about risk, Untitled makes them look like formalist snowflakes. Untitled is not IC a la Fraser, because all meta & irony is lost to something much more real. Unless, as Isabelle Graw writes in response to Untitled, we “rethink the idea of critique as a form of abandon”. It appears on the front cover of a monograph of the artist’s work as recent as 2015, an outlier work that wraps Fraser’s work before & after like a skin, like a pregnancy, naked, alone

MIKE KELLEY: Because dolls represent such an idealised notion of the child, when you see a dirty one, you think of a fouled child. And so you think of a dysfunctional family. In actuality, that's a misreading, because the doll itself is a dysfunctional picture of a child. It's a picture of a dead child, an impossible ideal produced by a corporate notion of the family. To parents, the doll represents a perfect picture of the child. It's clean, it's cuddly, it's sexless, but as soon as the object is worn at all, it's dysfunctional. It begins to take on characteristics of the child itself — it smells like the child and becomes torn and dirty like real things do. It then becomes a frightening object because it starts to represent the human in a real way and that's when it's taken from the child and thrown away.

In our culture, a stuffed animal is really the most obvious thing that portrays the image of idealisation. All commodities are such images, but the doll pictures the person as a commodity more than most. By virtue of that, it's also the most loaded in regard to the politics of wear and tear.

R: Does this prejudice against dirtiness strike you as something peculiarly American?

MK: I'm sure all cultures have something that takes the place of dirt in ours — of the repressed thing. That's part of the machinery of culture. But in America, there also seems to be an intense fear of death and anything that shows the body as a machine that has waste products or that wears down…

On first experiencing your work in 2008 in a New York galley, you expanded my horizons as to what were the limits of art, and how sometimes art is not as free or permissible as it makes itself out to be. I heard you failed your MFA at a big New York art school because you claimed some Texas artists made it all. Who knows. I screened your film “Good Times Will Never be the Same” at Mermaid Arts Centre in 2012 to a small audience of 5. Your kidnapping service drew out fetishists and masochists alike, dressed in your particular aesthetic that owes so much to Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades and Mike Kelley. That said, you were the source I drew most from.

Description:

“Summer 2002, New York, NY. ‘The client got loose while being transported in a duffle bag and had to be fought to get him under control.’ In the summer of 2002, New York based artist, Brock Enright and a group of his friends from Virginia, started a kidnapping service called Videogames Adventure Services. The clients would hire them to provide a reality based kidnapping experience, while still retaining the ability to stop the ‘game’ at any time. Parameters were set ahead of the service, detailing the activities to be performed, but the actual time of the kidnapping was kept secret to add to the fantasy. An abuse fetish seemed to be shared by the clients as the activites were more physical than sexual in nature. Prices started at $2500 and the imagination of the client and actors were the only limits.”

Jean Paul Sartre tells a story about a young boy peeping through a keyhole on the top of a stairway in an existential Parisian apartment block. The boy enjoys the view through the keyhole. It is not a shared experience, just the boy & what we imagine is catching his eye beyond the keyhole. Something sexual. Something beautiful. Disrobing. Naked. Or none of the above. Maybe the desire to look without others looking at him look. Voyeurism. Who knows. Then suddenly the boy hears hollow steps on the stairs behind him. His desire is lost in the fear & shame of being caught looking. Shame is kind of a terrible lie. Sartre’s theory of the gaze is about the gaze of the other; Jacques Lacan’s theory of the gaze is about the gaze of the fetishished object, a linguistic labyrinth that I will not enter right now, if I haven’t already. Sartre’s story is perhaps exorcised from personal experience. As a young boy Sartre discovered, not through his own gaze, but his mother’s horrified gaze - after she cut his beautiful blond locks as a child - that he was terribly ugly. Seems made up. A metaphor. Of course his mother knew his face under the blond veil. If we continue with the metaphor, the lie, we could say Sartre’s long blond hair was the lie, & his one good eye out of a set of two bad ones, was also the lie, the peephole through which the world is experienced & judged.

Alessandro Rabottini characterises Cluj School painter, Victor Man, “partial”. In psychoanalysis partiality & preference are the peep holes through which you view the whole. I think art does the same, what many might define negatively as voyeurism, but what I have come to think of positively as love. Love being something you are quite particular about, unless you are on Instagram. 

Recently I read someone using your name to illustrate how wrong you were about Diane Arbus (who will also arrive some day, somewhere in this calendar). It grates the way you are used time and again to prove wrongness. If they read your introduction to the reprint of your 1960s collection of essays “Against Interpretation”, wherein you acknowledge you got it wrong from time to time, they’d realise that you got it wrong because you took critical risks, not like those yes-men that always get it right.

Every year I use your eponymous essay “Against Interpretation” as a perverse opening salvo in a module that fosters interpretation. Of course we could interpret your rallying cry against mining for content in the artwork as a wish, as a hope to escape your beautiful intellect for something bodily. Or we could go with Philippe Parenno’s advice in DAY 1 that “The idea is to read rather than to contemplate, to be active in front of the work.”

The most efficient way I can describe “the uncanny” is to imagine that I am teaching, as I am now before you, and the classroom door opens and another version of me enters the room to look at me teaching. That is kinda uncanny, but what could make it uncannier is when I look at you, the students, looking at the other me looking at me teaching. Freud’s uncanny is not just intellectual uncertainty, it is more affect than effect. It’s like what Jacques Lacan says referring to the uncanny: “I see myself seeing myself.”

Victor Man, Untitled (Shaman Il), 2008, oil on canvas mounted on wood, 45 × 30 cm

Susan Sontag alone on a bed. N.Y.C. 1965. Photograph by Diane Arbus

"Artists are optimists!" you said. Naturally I agreed with you. Under withering Christmas lights your statement dimmed against the neon shadows of COVID signage. En route home I repeated "artists are optimists" as if repetition would turn to revelation like the mantra of Hail Mary's & Our Father's I unwittingly murmured in the turned-sod graveyards of my adolescence. Pessimism had always been my friend. Raw, cut, wet clay is a beautiful thing up close & on your knees; especially topped by green shoots of life stomped by freshly polished black shoes. My personal experience of being an artist & being with artists is crushing pessimism; selves embossed by the depths of a narcissism indelibly engraved by the past--pessimism being a symptom of the past, of experience, of gravely want & woe, body upon body upon body, Amen. Optimism is pessimism amen-ded. Popular culture's dependency on binaries tells us we are either this or that. Choose or die! Such binaries don't exist. Does that make me a pessimist or optimist? It's strange how we balance the scales of difference on either/or when one extreme begets another: left & right, night & day; friend & enemy; love & hate; fact & fiction. A corrective to such binary rivalry is needed. The seeds of pessimism come from the highest, redest, ripest apple that falls from the tallest, thinnest tree to plummet past the waxy green & polished blacks that hedge the clay rectangle of our deepest fate. There, beneath the beneath, the apple cracks on impact. Seeds disperse & fruitful despair blossoms. Beautifully dark & deep in colour & grip, pessimism is a baroque bouquet that entangles the feet of the fallen & risen. Falling & climbing, climbing & falling, the optimist falls from fantasy to meet the pessimist, halfway, climbing from reality. 

Words by Diane Arbus.

“I worked a lot in Washington Square Park. It must have been about 1966. The park was divided. It has these walks, sort of like a sunburst, and there were these territories staked out. There were young hippie-junkies down one row. There were lesbians down another, really tough, amazingly hard-core lesbians. And in the middle were winos . . . They were like the first echelon, and the girls who came from the Bronx to become hippies would have to sleep with the winos to get to sit on the other part with the junkie-hippies. It was really remarkable. And I found it very scary. I mean, I could become a nudist, I could become a million things. But I could never become that, whatever all those people were. There were days I Just couldn't work there, and then there were days I could. And then, having done it a little, I could do it more. I got to know a few of them. I hung around a lot. They were a lot like sculptures in a funny way. I was very keen to get close to them, so I had to ask to photograph them. You can't get that close to somebody and not say a word, although I have done that.”

*And choosing a subject (for the artist)

"The Chinese have a theory, that you pass through boredom into fascination, and I think it's true. I would never choose a subject for what it means to me or what I think about it. You've just got to choose a subject, and what you feel about it, what it means, begins to unfold if you just plain choose a subject and do it enough.”

The unconscious: “a place of thought that does not think”(Jacques Rancière).

Picture this: American artist Ed Ruscha cruising around L.A. — the billboard-thin backdrop to his text paintings & photographs — listening to the radio tuned into two stations, anticipating the expected & familiar pothole he has stopped avoiding over the years & grown to want, to need, to love as a “spiritual hotspot”. This all plays out in a short film that traces Ruscha's journey from L.A. home to L.A. studio. Never did I think L.A. would be the place where the unconscious would come forth in my consciousness, my definition, L.A. being a place that wears surface as history. But that's just it, the unconscious is not to be found in a dimly lit cellar where Freud's agents of id., ego & superego hide in a windowless three-cornered room with a swinging light bulb lighting up their uncanny personalities one by one. No. The unconscious is not the subconscious. The unconscious is Ed Ruscha on a bright & blue L.A. day enroute to his studio, tweaking the radio dial so that two channels bunk together, dream together; the stock markets on top, country & western music underneath. Freud called the unconscious a double inscription; Ruscha's radio is a double inscription. In the 1960s the French psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire, a disciple of Jacques Lacan, proffered the analogy of a radio tuned into two stations to describe the unconscious, except Leclaire's genre was jazz not country & western. Like the visual drone of David Lynch's Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, America & its levels of thin seems more in tune with the enigmatic surface of the unconscious than anywhere else

"The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw."

Don DeLillo’s novella “Point Omega” opens and ends in a gallery in New York. The protagonist creep, who is hidden from view in some dark corner in the gallery, watches a film obsessively. He has returned to the gallery every day without fail. Although he watches the film, he also watches other people watching the film. When two academics from the nearby film school enter the gallery, he goes into a monologue about how, even though they have the correct language to talk about the film, they don’t see and feel the film the way he does. The academics leave after a short while, giving credence to the creep’s thesis that they are detached viewers, whereas he is a viewer that is touched, in more ways than one. The film, although not named, is Douglas Gordon’s “24 Hour Psycho” (1993). Gordon appropriated Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 “Psycho”, and slowed it down to approximately two frames a second, rather than the usual 24, resulting in the film lasting exactly 24 hours.

“While staying in Canada, Helen Chadwick and her partner, David Notarius, set off to different locations and made a mound of snow and placed a large flower shaped cutter over it. Chadwick and Notarius then took turns urinating in the snow. The cavities created by the urine were then filled with plaster and were shipped back to the UK where they were grafted onto hyacinth bull-shaped pedestals and cast in bronze, enamelled white, and inverted. Initially, Chadwick had planned to take photographs of pitted snow, making light drawings of the alpine microcosm, but later realised that this would only be visible if it was cast and made into a sculpture.

Chadwick described the work as a ‘metaphysical conceit for the union of two people expressing themselves bodily’. Upon initial inspection the central phallic form of Piss Flowers may appear to be created by a man; but it is actually caused by Chadwick, who was closer to the ground, squatting.”

From Adam Philips essay ‘Against Inhibition’:

“In his book The ‘Last Avant-Garde’, David Lehman tells an Instructive story about Kenneth Koch's becoming a poet - acquiring the sense that it was poetry he was writing and wanted to write - in Ohio in the 1940s. It depended a great deal, accordling to Koch, on a teacher he was fortunate enough to have had in high school called Katherine Lappa. 'Lappa inspired him to a lifelong love of poetry,' Lehman writes,

when she told him it was OK to allow his anti-social impulses into his poetry. The sensuality and violence that the boy felt he had to repress in his daily life found their way into the stream of consciousness writing he set himself to do. In one piece he wrote of the urge to 'step on a baby's head because it is so big and round and soft like a balloon, and would go squash under my feet'. Katherine Lappa remained unflappable. 'That's very good,' she said, 'that's just what you should be feeling - part of what you're feeling. Keep doing it.' Koch would come to regard this as an 'instance of the benevolent influence that Freud has had on my life. I was able to enjoy the benefit of a teacher who in Cincinnati in 1942 had undergone psychoanalysis.'”

I have described the uncanny here before in the imaginary scenario in which I am teaching, and the classroom door opens and another version of me enters the room to look at me teaching. That is kinda uncanny, but what could make it uncannier is when I look at you, the students, looking at the other me looking at me teaching. This is what Jacques Lacan sums up as: “I see myself seeing myself.”  But there is another uncanny (unhemlich) — Enter Gregor Schneider. 

In the 1980s Gregor started to build rooms within rooms in his family home. He videotaped the results which bled into the artworld such as at the Venice Biennale. But those doubles were just replicas of the very personal and strange warren that to this day, continues to be transformed back in Germany. 

Gregor is more of a Freudian than a Lacanian due to his uncanny being tied to the home. So Gregor has been clicking his heels 👠 for over 30 years to construct a space that may come across as strange and even terrifying — the uncanny being a type of terrifying in Freud’s words — for anyone but Gregor. 

I remember Thomas Demand, who was in the same class as Gregor in art school (what an alumni), who said at IMMA that Gregor was strange, and he didn’t like him. An artist lecturer from my art school days said when I brought him up as an influence: “Thank god he found art.” During COVID Gregor appeared in a Zoom call sitting in his family home, chatting how, even though his artworld globetrotting was on pause, he rather liked being back home. He looked happy. “There’s no place like home”

The two black “cuts” in this Luc Tuymans painting are not “cuts”, but the painterly expression of a zip, a zip that allows access to the empty torso of the sackcloth doll to stuff & bring it back to substantial life from deflated death. I think death is executed in every part of this painting of Tuymans’ childhood stuffed doll, even though I can’t imagine Tuymans was ever a child. The decapitated porcelain head, the cropped genitalia at the V, the awkward elbows: “A supposed mutilation that is or is not there” has taken place through the act of painting. Entitled “Body”, death is inferred by the present & absent body parts, but also the death of childhood.

Donald Winnicott has this theory about a healthy object that the child holds onto tightly in the first moments of separation from the mother’s embrace. The child goes out in the world, but needs something, some object, to make that transition from mother to social life bearable. For Elmo is was a blanket. Winnicott calls it the Transitional Object.

This object, as portrayed by artist Mike Kelley too many times to list here, is usually a dirty, smelly, one-eyed teddy bear kinda object. Kelley laments & generalises that parents usually take this object from the child to clean & repair when it gets too grungy or gungy.

I don’t know if this painting of the doll-object is Tuymans’ Transitional Object. It does mark the ‘1990’s moment when the artist would become “Luc Tuymans” as we know him in the artworld today. But more generally, I wonder if it is a Transitional Object at all. It doesn’t look that healthy. Mike Kelley, a committed & brilliant reader of psychoanalytic theory, said somewhere that it is hard to tell between the Transitional Object & the Fetish, which I don’t have room to think about now.

Painting of the Wolf Dream by the Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff)

Card for Robert Mapplethorpe’s duel exhibitions, Pictures, at Holly Solomon Gallery (flower pictures) and The Kitchen (sex pictures) February, 1977. 6.25 x 10in.

Here’s Gregor Schneider wearing an Aldi bag on an Aldi bag. Date? title? location? probably his family home where he continues to build rooms within rooms

KAI ALTHOFF, Häuptling Klapperndes Geschirr, October 24, 2018 - January 20, 2019, TRAMPS 75 East Broadway, Flr 2 New York, NY 10002.