Destruction of the Sexual Thing
HERMAN RAPAPORT
"What is a Picture?" Times Two
JAN AVGIKOS
Saturday Night Fever, or "What is a Picture?"
CATHERINE LIU
Étant Donnés: Le Gaz(e) d'Éclairage
ADRIAN DANNATT
The Rustle of Painting
BARRY SCHWABSKY
The Amateur Genius and the Dog
RICHARD FOREMAN
The Newly Renovated Opera House on Gilligan's Island
JOHN YAU
Watching Things Work
BARBARA HENNING
"What is a Picture?"
PEGGY PHELAN
A Cameo
RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN
A minus sign followed by the Greek letter phi in lower case, the algorithm (-
) should elucidate the attributes of the picture which is you. Yet evasive in its function of constituting the objet a, a return of the object which may take different contours, the actual algorithm symbolizes an imaginary lack "central to desire."
A return of the object in the real? The outcome takes fantasy to single out the lack before being followed by the same Greek letter phi, now in upper case (-
), identifying its symbolic character. Indeed a word, though a phallus, the symbolic account is thus empty. Yet structural in its function of conveying desire, the phallic signifier takes in the status of an objet a because it exceeds the Other, "...in you more than you."
Your desire is not your own but the desire of an Other. If it needs to be staged it is because you may want to recognize this desire as your own. Fantasy conveys the image, its particular lack eliminating the subject in the actual scribble of a word, "...something appropriates the gaze to the function to which it may be put in the symbolic relation in man."
What is prior to the word? The eye and the gaze split: you may only look out from a spot in space, but you are looked at from everywhere else.
You look...what you see is determined by how you are looked at. Why? Because your subjectivity is more likely to depend on the way you are looked at than on what you see.
What you see...Once you see, you've stopped looking. In the sense that while you look you are trying to find something, watching is what prompts the instant that may hold the eye on the uncovered object. But what if this object is hollow? An inversion happens: the detour around the hollow object — in behalf of drive — conveys the knowledge of a prevenient possession, lost. Latent in the subject, loss prevails on jouissance. Drive: the subject gets soaked up by the actual objet a in the seeing act.
The subject that is an object, that is the gaze, is outside: you are looked at, you are the picture. Lacan's sardine-tin story throws light on the issue of the "all-seen" subject, now splitting in search of itself, now diving, now reduced to zero.
In this little anecdote Lacan happens to be in search of something different, "in the country, or at the sea." So much so that from morning till night he finds himself sailing... on a tiny boat, in the midst of fishermen, parting from the local port. Brittany was not really industrialized at that point — there were no trawlers — and the fishermen went to sea in their own frail crafts, at great risk to themselves. "It was this risk, this danger that I loved to share."
One day, while waiting for the moment to pull in the nets, Petit-Jean pointed out to Lacan something floating on the surface of the waves. It was a sardine can. Floating there in the sun, it was "a witness to the canning industry." Petit-Jean said, "You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesn't see you!"
We may guess that Lacan was already talking to these men about things they had never heard of before, but they seemed to understand more than what he expected. In saying this Petit-Jean was laughing. Not Lacan. Why? Because he understood that the can was seeing him, "...at the level of the point of light at which everything that looks at you is situated."
What does Lacan mean by this point of light, and why would the event disturb him? The pattern of the fractured word pre-exists the being, already breaking up between itself and its semblance, between itself and the photograph it shows to the other. Thus the point of light embodying the gaze: "...I enter light and it's from the gaze that... I am photo-graphed."
In this picture there is Lacan, himself a rare object in the landscape — a sardine tin in the sea. Caught in metaphor, if the tin represents a devastating eruption of industry in the realm of nature, Lacan's presence among those fellows earning their livings with great difficulty, "looked like nothing on earth."
From the perspective of the subject, how Lacan looked at/from the can was not affected by the fishermen's thoughts or feelings. His perception, in the Other, is but his own perception of himself. "In the depths of my eye the picture is painted, but the subject is not in the picture... if I am anything in the picture, it is always in the form of the screen... the stain, the spot."
The notion of the stain comes back later in Encore, "...there where it talks, it jouis, but it knows nothing." Two categories of thought: "la pensé,...it thinks you, le pensé,...it thinks of you."
It, a stain, thinks you. If the work of art, like the signifier equated to an angel, is empty — in the sense that you are not supposed to eat Andy Warhol's Campbell's Soup, or clean the house with his Brillo pads — if the work of art thinks you, it is because it may hold you in its fold, for the stain/you to joui, there where it talks, but wants to know nothing.
From Louis Aragon, from Contre-chant, in the Fou d'Elsa:
A wretch, I am like mirrors
That can reflect but cannot see
like them my eye is empty and like them inhabited
By your absence which makes them blind.
lacanian ink 9 is a catalog.
On May 3, 1994, lacanian ink organized the show
"Written/Spoken/Drawn," where 38 artists displayed their works after the phrase — in lacanian ink 1 — "I write the body with lacanian ink." On May 4, 5, and 7, a series of writers, poets, and art critics lectured, read, engaged in debate.
So Herman Rapaport wanders through Edvard Munch's paintings while raising Lacan's point of view on this artist's work. About The Cry... "Here one may ask whether a sexual relation with an Other requires the destruction of things that are or which figure sex, in this case, the embracing lovers." And Raphael Rubinstein wonders about an Other embodied in the image of two colossal people in a photograph stuck in his mind. His incessant Sunday-morning pedaling stands out in contrast to unmoved moving: Hitchcock and Monferrato —...would never be men of action, only the men who called out 'action.' "
Jan Avgikos confronts relations between discourses. "Am I being an elitist in saying that Lacanians can never really grasp what we art theorists are concerned with? That you can never really contribute to the particulars of our discourse?... In spite of all that, we need you... desperately." Catherine Liu approaches the Brooklyn/Manhattan discourse articulated in Saturday Night Fever, in which John Travolta evokes the artist trying to "emerge from the group or group show in which he/she finds him/herself in order to gain access to the couple relationship that he/she is supposed to have with a dealer, or as in the case of serial monogamy, dealers."
Richard Foreman undertakes the adventure of The Amateur Genius, dogged by Himself, while obsessively anticipating a street victimizer: "The Amateur Genius had no hold on reality, that was his hold on reality." For Peggy Phelan it's the seduction of a phantom. Herself? "Something too about the lure and the gaze, the hole in the signifier, and the hole in our bodies. The leak and the lack."
Ian Grey objectifies the Other while recognizing his desire streaming out in the act of a young girl's bloodletting. Did he make a little vampire? "And then, for the first time, she handed me the blade." Barry Schwabsky challenges Brenda Zlamany's portrait of a pregnant nude. Her look behind the nipple... a nip-pull? from the earrings... an ear-ring? What we read about pulls and rings is that they may reveal the gaze: "The nipple is, so to speak, a fetish this woman projects... And what about the ear?"
Barbara Henning is "Watching Things Work... Against a mottled background... Tiny little woman in a teacup. Under a babushka/ who is woman? Who is man?" John Yau exalts in images and word figures, "...each word forming like a soap bubble on the craters of his huge, cracked, blue lips... The word 'stupendous' is carefully printed in turquoise lipstick on the refrigerator's yellow enamel door." Adrian Dannatt lines up the self-gratifying gaze — seeing you, thinking you — with abstract Kabbala patterns, both revealing to the corner of your eye: you don't see till you saw... you don't understand till you understood: "...the gaze of illumination will only ever really be a gaz (gas), amorphous and impossible to make solid."
JOSEFINA AYERZA
Notes
1. Quotations in the first part of To resume..., are from Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York,: W.W. Norton, 1978), chapters 8, 9, & 20. back up
2. Ibid., Encore (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1975), chapter 9. back up