Krauss Rosalind E Bachelors
Krauss Rosalind E Bachelors
OCTOBER Books
Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster,
Denis Hollier, and Silvia Kolbowski, editors
Broodthaers, edited by Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
AIDS: Cultural Analysis/Cultural Activism, edited by Douglas Crimp
Aberrations, by Jurgis Baltrusaitis
Against Architecture: The Writings of Georges Bataille, by Denis Hollier
Painting as Model, by Yve-Alain Bois
The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents, edited by Clara Weyergraf-Serra and Martha Buskirk
The Woman in Question, edited by Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie
Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, by Jonathan Crary
The Subjectivity Eect in Western Literary Tradition: Essays toward the Release of Shakespeares Will,
by Joel Fineman
izek
Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, by Slavoj Z
Cinema, Censorship, and the State: The Writings of Nagisa Oshima, by Nagisa Oshima
The Optical Unconscious, by Rosalind E. Krauss
Gesture and Speech, by Andre Leroi-Gourhan
Compulsive Beauty, by Hal Foster
Continuous Project Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris, by Robert Morris
Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists, by Joan Copjec
Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, by Kristin Ross
Kant after Duchamp, by Thierry de Duve
The Duchamp Eect, edited by Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon
The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, by Hal Foster
OCTOBER: The Second Decade, 19861996, edited by Rosalind Krauss, Annette Michelson,
Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Hal Foster, Denis Hollier, and Silvia Kolbowski
Innite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 19101941, by David Joselit
Caravaggios Secrets, by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit
Scenes in a Library: Reading the Photograph in the Book, 18431875, by Carol Armstrong
Neo-Avantgarde and Culture Industry: Essays on European and American Art from 1965 to 1975, by
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh
Bachelors, by Rosalind Krauss
R E. K
OCTOBER
T MIT P
C, M
L, E
C L AU D E C AH U N
OF
AND
D O R A M AA R : B Y WAY
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I N T R OD U CT I ON
L O UI S E B OU R GE O IS : P O RT R AI T
OF T H E
F I LL E TT E
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A G NE S M A RT I N: T H E / C L O U D /
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E VA H E S S E: C O NT I NG E N T
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C I ND Y S H ER M AN : U NT I T LE D
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F R AN C E SC A W OO D MA N : P RO B LE M S ET S
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S H ER R I E L E V IN E : B A C H EL O RS
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L O UI S E L AW L ER : S OU V E NI R M EM O RI E S
191
207
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A RTI S T
AS
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I will open with an intellectual itinerary: the story of my own relation to surrealism which began as I, a young art historian and critic, was wrestling with the
problem of the development of modern sculpture. This was in the 1960s and so
the problem as I had inherited it in those years was mainly posed in terms of
questions of style. Given what I saw, however, as the consistent choice of surrealist sculptors to appropriate the dominant stylistic option of closed, monolithic
form and to transform Brancusis ovoids or Maillols archaic fragments or
Moores impassive boulders into a collection of cages and bottles and pieces of
furniture, I found myself converting these stylistic adaptations into vehicles of
expression. For with these elements surrealist sculpture seemed to have devised
an insistent vocabulary that turned on the thematic of the incarceration of the
female body and the imaginative projection of violence against it.1
In making this analysis I was, of course, moving within the tide of what
was developing at the end of the sixties in the work of a feminist critic like
Xavie`re Gauthier and would swell by the middle of the eighties into the ood
of a generally held feminist consensus that surrealism, as a movement organized
and dominated by men, was deeply misogynist.2 If Gauthier had begun by tracing sadism toward women as the persistent thematic of surrealist imagery, analyzing it as a defense against male castration anxiety, the blanket notion of surrealist
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Constantin Brancusi, Torso of a Young Man, ca. 1916. Wood, Philadelphia Mueum of Art,
Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection.
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Rene Magritte, Femme-bouteille, 1940 or 1941. Oil on claret bottle, 11 1/2 inches.
Private collection, New York.
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tribal art might prove illuminating for analyzing the larger stakes in the shift I
saw surrealist sculpture announcing.
The breakthrough to my problem came in the form of Giacomettis precise point of entry into the avant-garde, which marked the fact that before he
was taken up by Andre Breton in 1930, he had been integrated by Michel Leiris
into the circle connected to the magazine Documents led by Georges Bataille, a
circle composed of renegade surrealists. Thoroughly ignored by the Giacometti
literature as a factor of any real importance, this connection seemed, on the contrary, to yield an extraordinary harvest of conceptual issues that not only went
far to account for Giacomettis choices in constructing an art that mainline surrealism would soon enthusiastically claim as its own but also generated analytic
categories for understanding other parts of surrealist production that had hitherto
been recalcitrant to explanation.
The most general of these categoriesor terms of analysiscomes from
Batailles lapidary Dictionary entry devoted to the word formless that he published in 1929 in Documents. There, announcing that words should have jobs
rather than denitions, he says that the job of formless is to declasser, an action
that simultaneously (1) lowers or debases objects by stripping them of their pretensionsin the case of words, their pretensions to meaningand (2) declassies, or attacks the very condition on which meaning depends, namely, the
structural opposition between denite terms.
With this idea of declassing, it seemed to me that various strategies in
Giacomettis work had found their explanatory model in one gostrategies that
ranged from the lowering of the normatively vertical axis of free-standing
sculpture onto the debased condition of an identity as mere sculptural base
the board-game operation, in shortto the declassifying or destabilization at
large in works like Suspended Ball, where formlessness is to be found in a kind of
categorical blurring. For in that object, the sexually suggestive sliding of a cloven
ball over a recumbent wedge sets up the activity of a caress between organs
whose gender identity is wholly unstable, seeming with each swing of the pendulum to change associations: the wedge altering its state from a female-labial
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Alberto Giacometti, Suspended Ball, 193031. Plaster and metal, 24 x 14 1/4 x 14 inches.
Kunsthaus, Zurich, Alberto Giacometti Foundation. Photo by Walter Drayer.
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Raoul Ubac, The Battle of the Amazons (Group III), 1939. Silver print. Galerie Adrien Maeght, Paris.
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Maurice Tabard, Untitled, ca. 1930. Silver print. Collection Lucien Treillard, Paris.
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Man Ray, Anatomies, ca. 1930. Silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 inches. Museum of Modern Art,
New York.
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Man Ray, Hat, 1933. Silver print, 6 3/4 x 5 1/4 inches. Collection Rosabianca Skira,
Geneva.
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13
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Raoul Ubac, Portrait in a Mirror, 1938. Silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 inches. Metroplitan Museum
of Art, New York.
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follow the principle of the diary or for that matter the journalists report, in
which a story is launched without the narrator having the slightest idea of its
outcome. Thus if Nadja was begun as the account of an episode that had run its
course and whose nish Breton knew, the book ends with the unexpected entrance into its pages of a stranger whose arrival could in no way be anticipated
at its outset. The specic feature of Surrealist writing, Hollier urges, whether
it be autobiographical or automatic, is, in fact, less the lack of knowledge of its
nal destination as such than the identical position into which this lack places
both the reader and the author in the face of a text whose unfolding neither the
one nor the other controls, and about which both of them know neither the
future nor the ending. 5
The structural passivity that is so important to this conception of writing
participates in the conceptual blurring common to the rest of surrealist practice
in that it breaks down the dierence between those formerly positioned oppositesauthor and readerand thus between the inside and the outside of the
text. Thus Hollier concludes: They are, both author and reader, on the same
side of the events, on the same side of the page. The one who writes has no
privilege, no advance over the one who reads. He doesnt know any more about
it than the other. 6
There are ways in which Holliers characterization of Nadja and Susan
Suleimans presentation of the strategies Marguerite Duras would later employ
in her novel The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein suggest a strange parallel in this matter
of the feminization of the narrator. For in projecting her story of Lol Stein
through the halting, hallucinatingly repetitive voice of Jacques Hold, both a participant in the erotic triangle in which he and Lol are caught and the point of
view from which that triangulation is seen, Duras has decided to construct a
male narrator who is feminized and who declares his feminization in terms of
his never being able to know the object of his gaze: To have no knowledge
at all about Lol, he says, was to know her already. One could, I realized, know
even less, ever less and less, about Lol V. Stein. And this lack of knowledge,
which is to say this lack of authority about the giving of both the storys details
and its meaning, is intended to function, Suleiman goes on to say, as the thematic
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mirror for what Duras wants at the level of formspecically, a type of writing
she will also characterize as feminine, a writing that is hesitant, uncertain, full
of silences.7
It is thus with Duras, a woman writer, that the convergence between two
types of marginalization willin Suleimans accountbe most fully achieved,
as the feminine and the avant-garde will each be seen to function as a trope for
the other, each a picture of the others deconstructive strength, won precisely
by the position of each outside the self-deceptive and self-blinding occupation
of the cultural center with its categorical unities and its assumed truths. In this
sense Duras is allowed to epitomize what another feminist critic has seen as being
the case for every avant-garde position throughout the twentieth century
namely, the putting into discourse of woman or what could be called the
avant-gardes historically unprecedented exploration of the female, dierently
maternal body. 8
And yet within Suleimans own feminist account Duras functions as a
double-edged sword. On the one hand in her decision to let her character
Jacques Hold tell Lols story, Duras is a reminder to a certain kind of literalizing
stance that a feminist reading that makes every male into an exploiter of women
by appropriating both the womans gaze and her story is a pitifully impoverished
reading whose univocal production of its own unwavering point of view
amounts to siding, precisely, with the very patriarchy it wishes to contest. But
on the other hand, Duras becomes the occasion for Suleiman to deny male writers
the very possibilities of equivocation to which only sheas a woman author
is seen to have access. For sensitive as she is to the hesitancies and gaps in knowledge of Durass narrator, Suleiman is unable to see the same qualities projected
through Bretons procedures in Nadja, which as Hollier has shown are deeply
structural to Bretons tale.
To have turned to Susan Suleimans account of Duras is not a way of abandoning what I named at the outset as the itinerary of my own connection to
surrealism, but rather a means of entering more fully into it. For insofar as my
position has been centered on the deconstructive logic of surrealism, insofar as I
have described surrealist photographers as building a subject position into their
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work such that its viewer, stripped of authority and dispossessed of privilege, will
be trapped in a cats cradle of representation, caught in a hall of mirrors, lost in a
labyrinth, 9 I have seen this practice as one of feminizing the viewing subject in
a move that is deeply antipatriarchal. Further, insofar as what occurs at the pole of
the object is an experience of the gendered subjectmost frequently femaleas
constructed rather than biologically determined, a process of construction the
surrealists understood through the terms of psychoanalysis and from which they
mined accounts of fetishization and fantasy in order to support a transgressive
notion of gender, the surrealists must be seen to have opened patriarchys view
of woman up to questioning. It was for this reason that I wrote:
In much of surrealist practice woman, in being a shine on the nose
[Freuds rst example of the construction of the fetish], is nowhere
in nature. Having dissolved the natural in which normalcy can be
grounded, surrealism was at least potentially open to the dissolving
of distinctions that Bataille insisted was the job of the informe. Gender, at the heart of the surrealist project was one of these categories.
If within surrealist poetry /woman/ was constantly in construction,
then at certain moments that project could at least pregure a next
step in which a reading is opened onto deconstruction.10
And accordingly, I concluded, a view of surrealism as simply misogynist or antifeminist is mistaken.
The indignant dismissals of this position on the part of feminist writers
who have accused me of a collusion with the male gaze that has blinded me
to the surrealists deep misogyny have mostly been of the type that Suleiman
found herself fending o in the case of Durass use of Jacques Hold as the narrator
of Lol Steins story.11 But Suleiman has also found herself worrying about my
account of the movement; for, given the fact that the surrealist photographers
presented there are consistently male, she wonders whether its gural substitution of woman or the feminine for avant-garde practice [ends up by] eliding
precisely the question of the female subject. 12 Indeed, she goes on to ask
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whether the putting into discourse of woman by a woman writer is comparable, in its meaning and eects, to its putting into discourse by a male writer
and, maintaining that it is not, she concludes that a woman Surrealist cannot
simply assume a subject position and take over a stock of images elaborated by
the male imaginary. In order to innovate, Suleiman maintains:
she has to invent her own position as subject and elaborate her own
set of imagesdierent from the image of the exposed female body,
yet as empowering as that image is, with its endless potential for
manipulation, disarticulation and rearticulation, fantasizing and projection, for her male colleagues.13
Concluding that there were such women within the movement and that
henceforth it will be irresponsible for anyone speaking of surrealism not to devote considerable attention to them, she admits, after listing such gures as Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, Kay Sage, Leonor Fini, Valentine Hugo,
and Unica Zurn, that these were practitioners who entered the movement only
after it started its decline and, further, ones whose practice is most adequately
described through the notion of mimicry in which the woman repeats the
malein this case, the male Surrealistversion of woman, but does so in a
self-conscious way that points up the citational, often ironic status of the
repetition. 14
The idea of the gender specicity of the authorial subject, or rather the
certainty that gender necessarily divides the population of authors such that the
only way female artists could share a vision with male ones would be either
through collusion with a male gaze or by means of an ironizing, distancing resort
to mimicryin which imitation is self-consciously performed as apotropaic
gestureis something I wish to contest as introduction to a book on the work
of women artists. For in the matter of surrealism, and more specically in the
case of its photographic practice, I think that some of the most emblematic work
of the movementmost emblematic in the sense of both most representative
and most powerfulwas done by women.
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19
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Hans Bellmer, La Poupee, 1936/1949. Tinted silver print, 16 1/8 x 13 inches. Musee
National dArt Modern, Paris.
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This is the argument that Hal Foster makes in relation to Bellmers Poupees:
namely that they assault the Nazi subject with the very menace that subject fears,
which is not attack by a gure of power but invasion by a group of others who,
although identied as weak, nonetheless threaten its borders both geographically
( Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Bolsheviks) and psychically (the unconscious, sexuality, the feminine). This fear of invasion, pathological in the fascist subject,
must in its turn be seen as the projection of a fantasized bodily chaos against
which that subject armors himself, seeking a defense by means of a metallicized
human body whose aesthetic expression is a hardened and vulgarized neoclassicism. If Bellmers project submits itself to sadomasochistic fantasies in order to
explore the tension between the binding and shattering of the ego, this, Foster
argues, is to assume a complicity with the fascist subject only to expose it most
eectively, since in the Poupees, he says, this fear of the destructive and the
diusive is made manifest and reexive, as is the attempt to overcome it in violence against the feminine otherthat is a scandal but also a lesson of the
dolls. 15
That it is the Nazi subject that Bellmer is targeting is made particularly
explicit in one of the dolls in which the wheel of bent legs rotating around a
central ball joint is made to take the conguration of a swastika. The swastikoid
Medusa is not only a shattering image for the armored male ego but one that has
picked out its receiver.
In Dora Maars photograph to which she gave the name Pe`re Ubu, her
identication of the formlessness of the weakened boundary is represented more
famously if not more powerfully than in her two pairs of legs. Shown in 1936 at
the Charles Ratton Gallery where it presided over the surrealist objects exhibition, Dora Maars Ubu functioned from the very start, in fact, as the emblematic
surrealist photograph, having gone on to become a kind of mascot of the
movement.
It is not Dora Maar, however, but Claude Cahun who has recently
emerged as a powerful answer to Suleimans call for a woman surrealist who
would invent her own position as subject and elaborate her own set of images
dierent from the image of the exposed female body, yet as empowering as that
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Hans Bellmer, La Poupee, 1938. Tinted silver print, 11 x 19 1/4 inches. Private collection,
Paris.
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Hans Bellmer, La Poupee (Idole), 1937. Tinted silver print, 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches. Private
collection, Paris.
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Hans Bellmer, La Poupee, 1938. Tinted silver print, 5 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches. Private collection,
Paris.
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Dora Maar, Pe`re Ubu, 1936. Silver print, 15 1/2 x 11 inches. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York.
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image is . . . for her male colleagues. I say recently emerged because Cahun was
so little known from the time of her death until the past decade that reviewers
of the exhibition that included her, LAmour Fou: Surrealism and Photography
even reviewers well versed in surrealismassumed that with a rst name like
Claude, she had to be male. And this oblivion was further marked by the fact
that important anthologies devoted to the movements women, such as the 1976
special issue of Obliques called La Femme Surrealiste, or Surrealism and Women
edited by Mary Anne Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, or Whitney
Chadwicks Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985), never mention
Cahun.
But Cahunsurrealist writer, photographer, actress, political activist, participant in the French resistance, and amboyant lesbianhas come to stand for
an engagement with the construction of both identity and gender, as well an
exploration of the labile condition of subjectivity, which many feminist writers
nd exemplary.16 It is to this end that these critics inevitably turn to Cahuns
various statements about her assumption of the condition of masquerade, citing
with approval, for instance, the lines from her autobiographical Canceled Confessions in which she states: Under this mask, another mask. I will never nish
removing all these faces.
Indeed Cahuns entry into the world of the Parisian literary avant-garde
was marked by her adopting a pseudonym, the rst name of whichClaude
announced a gender indeterminacy that further adjustments in her physical appearance and self-presentation would reinforce. Shaving her head, or dying the
short crew cut she sometimes allowed to grow pink or green, she adopted a mask
of masculinity that she further exaggerated, for example, in the photographic
self-portraits that distort her skull through anamorphosis, or in the male parts
she chose to play in Albert-Birots theater. But when she decided to appear as
feminine, this too was projected as constantly mediated either through the mask
of makeup and artice or through the series of actual masks she assumed and
with which she surrounded herself. These remarkable self-portraits, which serve
as a series of baes behind which the real Claude Cahun disappears, function
further as the material from which Moore, Cahuns half-sister and lover, created
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Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, ca. 1928. Silver print. San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, Gift of Robert Shapazian.
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Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, 1929. Silver print. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
Gift of Robert Shapazian.
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Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, ca. 1928. Silver print. Private collection, Paris.
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Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, ca. 1928. Silver print. Boymans Museum, Rotterdam.
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Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, ca. 1927. Silver print. Berggruen Gallery, Paris.
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photomontages to mark the ten sections of Aveux non avenues (or Canceled Confessions), Cahuns collection of autobiographical narratives, poems, accounts of
dreams, and reections on the condition of identity.
Insofar as these reections challenge the very idea of selfhood as stable, as
in her formula To mirror and to stabilizethese are words that have no
business here, Cahuns deconstructive stance on the position of the subject is
continuous with the subjective blurring I have been attributing to much of surrealist production and discussing under the concepts formless, alteration, or
declassing. And indeed, insofar as many of Cahuns visual tropes pressed into
the creation of her masks use the same props to produce the same eects of
disarticulation and rearticulation, or of fantasizing and projection, as were employed by her male colleagues, there is a further continuity between her work
and theirs. I am thinking specically, here, of her placing her head under a bell
jar in a way that resembles the photograph Man Ray would call Homage to D.A.F.
de Sade, or her use of fun-fair mirrors to attack her own anatomy as in Kerteszs
Distortions, or her decision to curl up in a cupboard and assume the limpness and
docility of a doll as in Bellmers Poupees.
But to the very idea that Cahuns exploration of boundary conditions
might resemble that of the male surrealists, her feminist supporters object that
Cahuns autobiographical project not only puts her on both sides of the camerasimultaneously the subject and object of representationbut it also endows her, a woman, with the power of both projecting the gaze and returning
it, as Claudes eyes meet ours, sometimes seductively, sometimes hostilely, sometimes quizzically, from within the image. Indeed, they go on to say, the very
enterprise of self-portraiture, otherwise so absent from the entire corpus of surrealist photography, comes down to reclaiming agency for the female subject.
In all the discussions of Cahuns change of name as the expression of transvestitism and thus as emblematic of her decision to suspend the xity of gender,
there is almost no comment on the part of her pseudonym that does not bear on
matters of sex but rather on questions of race. Indeed, the subject who was born
Lucy Schwob, into an extremely prominent literary family, initially embraced
the pen name Claude Courlis to publish a text in 1914 in Le Mercure de France,
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Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, ca. 1929. Silver print. Private collection, Paris.
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Andre Ketesz, Distortion #6, 1932. Silver print, 9 3/16 x 7 3/16 inches. Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.
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Hans Bellmer, La Poupee, 1935. Silver print. Collection, Francois Petit, Paris.
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Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, ca. 1932. Silver print. John Wakeham Collection, New Jersey.
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the journal her famous uncle, Marcel Schwob, had helped found. But this embrace of masculinity was followed by yet a second problematizing of identity
when, in 1918, for another text in the same journal she assumed the last name
Cahun. Undoubtedly signicant that she was thereby assuming the name of her
mothers family, what has consistently gone without comment is that Cahun is a
French form of Cohen, and thus identies its bearer as belonging to the rabbinical class among Jews, just as Levy would identify its bearer as belonging to the
subpriestly liturgical class. Though undeniably Jewish, the name Schwob had
assumed a certain cultural veneer that armed its bearer somewhat against antiSemitism, joining it to Proust, among others. The act of deance attached to
leaving Schwob to aect Cahun can thus only be seen as one of aunting
ones Jewishness in the face of the heightened anti-Semitism of postwar France,
a kind of provocation every bit as dangerous as parading ones lesbianism.
Now Claude Cahun was not the only member of the postwar avant-garde
in France to couple travestie and Jewishness in one deant gesture. Marcel Duchamp tells Pierre Cabanne that when he wanted to change his identity in 1920,
the rst idea that came to him was to take a Jewish name. Saying I didnt nd
a Jewish name that I especially liked, or that tempted me, and suddenly I had an
idea: why not change sex? . . . the name Rrose Selavy came from that, 17 Duchamp simply slides by the fact that his nal choice allowed him to change sex
and take a Jewish name at one and the same time, since Levythe second
most Jewish name, after Cohenis unmistakably folded into Selavy.
This parallel between Cahun and Duchamp, alias Rrose Selavy, clearly
goes past the fact of the names, moving into the whole project of self-portraiture
that both of them shared, a project not only explored through photography but
also in the written and other forms of their work. And insofar as both of them
mark this exploration by means of a fold in the eld of representation, a fold
around which not only identities revolve and reect like a pair of double helixes
but also the positions of viewer and viewed become reversible, the parallel becomes all the more compelling.
The fold in Cahuns work results not only from her use of a mirror
to produce the eect of the real as a kind of giant Rorschach blot, in which
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Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, ca. 1919. Silver print. Zabriskie Gallery, New York.
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Claude Cahun and Moore, photomontage, Aveux non avenus, plate IV, 192930.
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Marcel Duchamp, note from The Green Box, reproduced in Michel Sanouillet and Elmer
Peterson, eds., Salt Seller: The Writings of Marcel Duchamp (Marchand du Sel) (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1973), 39.
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authentic and copy chase each others tail, but also of course from her use of
masks to create a kind of fold in the realm of subjectivitypersonhood exfoliating into persona. Such a fold is plotted at many points in Duchamps exploration
of identity, beginning with the horizon line of the Large Glass that separates the
realm of the Bachelors from that of the Bride, a line Duchamp would express as
a fold in his own subjectivity in the little sketch he made for the notes for the
Glass where the realm above the fold is given as MAR (for Mariee) and the one
below it as CEL (for Celibataires) so that, run together, they produce a Marcel
bisected through gender.
But Duchamp is also at pains to make clear that the fold is the nexus as
well of a kind of directional reversibility, as in the action of the Rotoreliefs, Rrose
Selavys own artistic product. There, projected through the 1923 Anemic Cinema,
the turning discs initiate a movement that soon creates the illusion that it has
reversed itself: protruding eye or breast, for example, becoming the retreating
hollow of uterine cavity; or, in the eld of language, the left-right reversal of the
contrepetrie, or spoonerism, folding the word esquimaux, for example, back on
itself to become aux mots exquis. Further, this doubling of a fold in identity with
a spatial fold that reverses directions so that viewer might change places with
viewed, or addressor with addressee, is expressed in the strange self-portrait Duchamp called Tu m where the poles you and me are suggested as being
reversible much as in the psychological phenomenon of transitivism, in which,
for instance, a child who sees another being slapped begins to cry, believing itself
to be the recipient of the blow.18
That the surrealists would have embraced this practice of the fold, so that
in the eld of language Robert Desnos would have published poetry consisting
of spoonerisms and signed Rose Selavy, or Michel Leiris would publish the same
form under the title Glossaire: Je serre mes glosses, is signicant in the particular way it inscribes Duchamp within the eld of the surrealism of the mid-1920s.
But in the matter of a parallel use of the folded self-portrait to explore identity,
Duchamp and Cahun should be placed in explicit relationship, I would argue,
to allow us to feel the extent to which such a fold disrupts the xed positions of
the viewer as much as that of the viewed. If we recognize that through the work,
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Marcel Duchamp, Disc with Inscriptions of Calembours: Des Esquimaux, 30 cm. diameter, 1926.
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Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, 1928. Silver print. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
Gift of Robert Shapazian.
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on either side of the line that divides subject and object, male and female identications are continuously changing places, it is not possible to take such a project
seriously and at one and the same time to proclaim the subject-position of the
works instigator as stable and female, as has been urged for Cahun.
Another way to put this would be to ask whether there is a material
dierence between her treatment of the eld of representation and that of Duchamp or between her use of masquerade and hisbeyond the fact that as a
younger artist and a surrealist, her work projects a sense of psychological intensity and disturbance that his avoids.
I do not ask this question to depreciate Cahuns work but rather to distance
myself from the assumption that resonates from within Suleimans (but I am only
citing her as the strongest such example) invocation of something called the
male imaginary. For the parallel between Cahun and Duchamp is meant to argue for a uidity in the eld of the Imaginary that allows for its positions to be
occupied by more than one gender at once. To say this is to assert that art made
by women needs no special pleading, and in the essays that follow I will oer
none.
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Her portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe, taken in 1982, shows her grinning impishly at the camera, swathed in a coat of dark, shaggy wool, jauntily carrying one
of her sculptures under her arm as though it were an umbrella or a cane that her
cupped hand supports at the objects protruding, forward end. But the sculpture
is not an umbrella or a cane. Called Fillette and dated 1968, it resembles nothing
so much as an outsized dildo, an association heightened by the way the photograph proles the twin ball-like forms that make up the sculptures nether region,
and at the other end, highlights its rigid shaft and rounded, furrowed tip. Is Louise Bourgeoiss grin, which breaks her face into a luminously soft series of eddies
and ripples, the response to her own imagining of the provocativeness of this
image?
Nearly ten years before, another woman artist, from an entirely dierent
generation, had had herself photographed, a dildo held erect from between the
legs of her naked body. Lynda Bengliss paid advertisement, published in Artforum
in November 1974, proclaimed the message of many young artists coming into
their own in the 1970s. The art world, it seemed to say, is being restructured as
a star system in which the artist is increasingly a commodity, a personality to be
packaged and sold. Warhol had said it all, the ad proclaimed, and hucksterism
had replaced aesthetics. Here is my body. Buy me.
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the world of the infant as so many breasts, mouths, bellies, penises, anuses. . . .
The part-object speaks to the imperiousness of the drives, to the rapacity of their
demands, to the way the body can, in the grip of fantasy, be riven, cannibalized, shattered.
There is nothing abstract about the part-object. But its logic, which
spells the connection between agentsthe desiring organs on the one hand and
the yielding or withholding objects of desire on the otherrather than between
individuals or whole persons, is reductive: the mother reduced to breast.
The extraordinary thing about the reception of Louise Bourgeoiss sculpture from its rst appearance at the end of the 1940s up to the late 1980s is that
it was consistently described as abstract, abstract in the sense of a modernist formal logic. There was almost always an admission that the aura of the human
body clings to the work, that there are erotic connotations, that the sexual organs
are somehow gured forth within it, that there are associations made to tribal
art. But nowhere in the literature on this sculpture was there a mention of the
part-object, even though this is work in which breasts (Trani Episode [197172]),
penises (Pregnant Woman [194749], Janus in Leather Jacket [1968]), clitorises
(Femme Couteau [196970]), vaginas ( Janus Fleuri [1968]), (Torso/Self-Portrait
[196566]), uteruses (Le Regard, [1966]) confront us singly (Fillette) or in groups
(Double Negative [1963]), and in which the choice of sculptural mediumrubber
latex, plastic, plaster, wax, resin, hempis consistently pushed toward the evocation of bodily organs and even the treatment of traditional materials like marble and bronze succeeds in capturing the tautness of swollen esh, the shininess
of membranous tissue. Nowhere, that is to say, was the expectation of an encounter with abstract sculpture made to admit that it is face to face with the
reality of organs.
But then this is also true of the literature on Brancusi, which is particularly
fond of describing the work in terms of geometric purity, idealized Platonic solids, reductions away from the human and into an ideated sphere. And what this
misses is what we could call the organ-logic of Brancusis work, its dynamic.
The gleaming polished bronze egglike form of The Newborn (1920) collapses
onto one and the same volume the infants demanding mouth and the mothers
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Janus in Leather Jacket, 1968. Bronze, 12 x 22 x 6 1/2 inches. Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
Femme Couteau, 1969. Pink marble, 3 1/2 x 26 3/8 x 4 7/8 inches. Jerry and Emily Spiegel Collection, New York.
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Janus Fleuri, 1968. Bronze, 10 1/8 x 12 1/2 x 8 3/8 inches. Galerie Lelong, Zurich.
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Torso Self-Portrait, 1969. Bronze with white patina, 24 3/4 x 16 x 7 1/2 inches.
Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
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Le Regard, 1966. Latex and fabric, 5 x 15 1/2 x 14 1/2 inches. Robert Miller Gallery,
New York.
Double Negative, 1963. Plaster and latex, 19 3/8 x 37 1/2 x 70 1/2 inches. Galerie Lelong,
Zurich.
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yielding breast, while its very mirrorlike surface, reecting everything in the
surrounding space onto its own exterior skin, underscores this logic of fusion
between part-objects, a logic that Melanie Klein was to call introjection/projection. Or again, Torso of a Young Man (1916), resembling the inverted crotch of
tree trunk and branches, projects the smooth castrated torso of the mother as
itself redoubled as the erect penis of the desiring child. In the space of desire,
the space of the part-object and its logic, organs attach to one another and fuse
with one another through the fantasy of introjection.
*
The series of paintings and drawings Bourgeois made in the late 1940s,
many of them called Femme-Maison, some of them abstract congurations of
hatched lines, are instantly reminiscent of a variety of surrealist art. Generally
speaking, the organization of the Femme-Maison works, with their layering into
three or four vertically stacked segments that brings about a sense of abrupt stylistic discontinuity between the house form and that of the lower part of the
woman to which the house abuts, promotes a strong sense of the surrealist exquisite corpsea form of collective drawing that produces conglomerate gures.
More specically, in the manner of setting up the strangely empty space, and in
the primitiveness of the drawing, as well as in the theme of human gure collapsed with objects or architecture, one feels a relationship to the work of Victor
Brauner, Toyen, and perhaps Mimi Parent. But behind the styles of these latter
three artists there is another element in turn, one that aected all of surrealism
of the late 1930s and 1940s; this is the experience, vigorously promoted by Andre Breton, of art made by schizophrenics. The concatenated images and rigid
outlines of now-famous mental patients such as Aloyse, Klotz, Woli, and
Neter, all had their eect on surrealist production. The most notorious case of
this is the composite image Max Ernst called Oedipus and published in Le Surrealisme au Service de la Revolution (no. 5, 1933), a work that seems to have been
inspired by Neters extraordinary drawing called Miraculous Shepherd. And in
Louise Bourgeoiss works of this time Neter is certainly present also, as is a kind
of obsessional doodling style, made famous in Andre Bretons essay Le Message
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train again, but soon ran back into the space between the doors.
While I was saying that he was going into dark mummy, he said
twice in a questioning way: Nurse? . . . As his analysis progressed
Dick had also discovered the wash-basin as symbolizing the mothers body, and he displayed an extraordinary dread of being wetted
with water. 3
The experience of the self as a set of objects and the need to connect each object
to a network of other objects nds another dramatic example in the autistic child
Joey, described by Bruno Bettelheim.4 Joey, who understands himself to be a
machinea sequence of gears and buttons and circuitrybelieves that all of his
life functions will only work if he, a machine, is plugged into other machines
that will, with their motors whirring and their lights blinking, allow him to
breathe, to eat, to defecate. Connecticut, Joey cries. Connect-I-cut.
*
The logic of Connect-I-cut and the logic of the part-object engage
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their essay on Desiring Machines, the
chapter that opens Anti-Oedipus, their study of schizo-captitalism. Beginning by
saying that a schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying
on the analysts couch, Deleuze and Guattari point to the self-descriptions of
famous schizophrenicsone is Judge Schreber, another Atonin Artaud, yet another is Becketts ctional character Molloyall of whom convey the dismembering logic of the part-object.5 Gone is the experience of the whole body, of
the integrated individual. Instead there are organsbreasts, anuses, mouths, peniseseach with its own imperious demands. And these, the part-objects, each
seeking another part-object onto which to attach, Deleuze and Guattari call the
desiring machines. The attachment is Joeys connectthe plug-in logic of
the machine. But the I-cut refers to the work of the machine, the product of
which is to resegment reality, to slice the continuous ows of energy that surge
through it into sections. The desiring machines produce by intercepting the
continuous ows of milk, urine, semen, fecal matter; they interrupt one ow in
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order to produce another, which the next machine will interrupt to produce a
ow for the next, and so on. Each machine is a part-object: the breast-machine,
the mouth-machine, the stomach-machine, the intestine-machine, the anusmachine. And the connections forged between these machines is a function of
the fact that each machine produces the ow that the next machine wants. For
Deleuze and Guattari this logic of machines, ows, connections, and production
is important. For it displaces fantasy and desire from its traditional, psychoanalytically understood realm of idealitysomething that happens in the head (in the
unconscious, in dreams, etc.)and moves it into the material domain. It becomes something that takes place in the eld of the real.
The part-object is, then, translated by Deleuze and Guattari into the desiring machine in order to insist on the reality of the machines production, and to
counteract the Kleinian, and Freudian, tendency to speak of its activity as symbolic only. The interest taken by the authors of Anti-Oedipus in the model of
schizophrenia stems from the degree to which the schizophrenic actually reworks reality to conform to this logic. But they are equally interested in the
model provided by another tradition of production, one which arose early in this
century and to which has been given another name, that of bachelor machine.
In 1952 Michel Carrouges published a study of this phenomenon, the
shared creation of a series of distinguished twentieth-century writers and artists.
Comparing Franz Kafkas mechanism for torture through tattooing in The Penal
Colony, Villier de lIsle Adams innitely seductive female robot in LEve future,
and Raymond Roussels machines for textual production in Impressions of Africa,
Carrouges began to perceive an imaginative pattern, one that he called the
bachelor machine after its most complete example: Marcel Duchamps La
mariee mise a` nu par ses celibataires, meme. Robotic, the bachelor machines involve
a perpetual motion that takes them outside the eld of organic procreation. Beyond the cycle of fecundation/birth/life/death, they constitute a dream of both
innite celibacy and total autoeroticism. Their life, which is in fact a continual
death, is the production of a kind of continual absence, for what they produce
is writing, or text. This is true of Kafkas tattoos, of Roussels painting or weaving
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machines, of the recordings built by Edison into the Eve imagined by Villier.
Duchamps Large Glass is, of course, the most specic model of the machine, its
most perfected instance. Everything is there: the plan for perpetual motion that
the Litanies chant as vicious circle; the complexity of the interconnectionsglider, malic molds, sieves, chocolate grinder, scissors. . . ; the sterility of
the cycle, its autoeroticism, its narcissism; the utter self-enclosure of the system,
in which desire is at one and the same time producer, consumer, and re-producer
(recorder or copier)which is to say, the bachelor apparatus below, the occulist
witnesses in mirrored disks on the right, the top inscription of the bride above,
in the cloud Duchamp identied as the blossoming.
The world constructed by Kafka or Villier or Roussel is ctional, but
within that world the bachelor machine acts in reality, not in fantasy. Likewise,
Duchamp suspends his laboriously realistic bachelor apparatus in a eld of glass
to give it the utmost illusion of actually being in the real space of its installation.
The insertion of desire in the space of the real, and the insistence on the reality
of its production, is the eort of the works presented by Carrouges, as it was to
become the eort of Breton as he theorized the position of surrealism. All of this
is, then, anti-Oedipal in the Deleuzian sense. All of it wants to counter the
idea of art as symbolic, as hidden away in the world of fantasy, as placed on
the shelves of a library or the pedestals of a museum. Desire, they insist, acts in
the eld of the real; it produces.
Not surprisingly, sculpture nds itself right in the middle of a battle about
whether it occupies the realm of reality, or that of representation only. From
Tatlins corner reliefs and his insistence on productivism to the Earthworks of
the 1970s, many twentieth-century sculptors have wanted to smash the glass
bubble that encases sculpture in a world of illusion, representation, idealization.
They wanted it to exist, to function, to act, in the eld of the real. But they were
ghting against all those intereststhe museum, the art market, the idealizing
aesthetic discoursefor which sculpture had to be seen as occupying not an
actual but a virtual realm, a realm in which one confronted not a thing, but
a representation. Throughout the century these interests continue to idealize
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sculpture; even while certain sculptors continue to ght that idealization. And
many of these do so from within the logic of the desiring machine, the bachelor
apparatus, the part-object.
*
Louise Bourgeois gave up painting in the late 1940s because, as she put it,
she was not satised with its level of reality. 6 Needing something to exist materially, something that would act in the physical world, she turned to sculpture.
And, seeking what she called fantastic reality, she sought the condition of the
desiring machine.
Just before making this move she had produced a little booklet containing
nine short stories (none longer than 75 words), each illustrated with an engraving, the book itself titled He Disappeared into Complete Silence. A typical story goes
like this:
Once a man was waving to his friend from the elevator.
He was laughing so much that he stuck his head out and the
ceiling cut it o.
*
In writing the introduction for this work, Marius Bewley cautions against
psychoanalytically projecting the stories and their accompanying images onto
their maker. It will be better to avoid any psycho-inquisitorial session, he says.
But his discussion cannot avoid the obvious pattern and tone of the stories in
which the plot and the aectless style repetitively stage the same tiny tragedies
of human frustration:
At the outset [he writes], someone is happy in the anticipation of an
event or in the possession of something pleasing. In the end, his own
happiness is destroyed either when he seeks to communicate it, or,
perversely, seeks to deny the necessity for communication. The protagonists are miserable because they can neither escape the isolation
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which has become a condition of their own identities, nor yet accept
it as wholly natural. Their attempts to free themselves, or accept
their situation invariably end in disaster, for the rst is impossible,
and the second is abnormal. One man becomes a tragic gure when
he discovers he cannot tell other people why he is happy. He tries,
but nobody can understand his speech.7
Meditating on the stories pattern of self-immurement and loss of communication, a drying up both of anything to say and any means of saying it, Bewley
then comments on the engravings in which people are replaced by a rigid architectural landscape occupied by ladders, cranes, water towers, elevator shafts. It is
an object-landscape, or, to relate it to the surrealist background from which it
springs, a part-object-landscape. And the stories, in both the obsession that
shapes their plots, and the mechanical atness of their tone, sound like schizostories, the litanies of the bachelor apparatus. Is it necessary to say, that in speaking of the work in this way, one has not entered a psycho-inquisitorial session?
Just as Beckett produces Molloy, Bourgeois produces He Disappeared into Complete
Silence. Molloy makes a certain logic available, explores it, turns it round before
the eyes of the reader; so does Bourgeois. And if she left drawing and painting
for sculpture, it was to do this with even greater physical insistence.
In all the literature that exists on Bourgeoiss work no word is ever
breathed about Marcel Duchamp. It is as though the bachelor apparatus could
have no resonance in her sculptural world. But Louise Bourgeoiss sculpture began by projecting the architectural elements from He Disappeared into Complete
Silence into three dimensions. In her rst sculptures, the anthropomorphized
building types yield to another kind of subarchitectural element, the carved entry
post set up in tribal villages, known to anyone even slightly acquainted with
African art. These composite posts as they emerged from Bourgeoiss hands
were given the status of subjects from the very rst. In 1949 they were called
things like Portrait of C. Y. or Portrait of Jean-Louis or Observer. But in 1950 they
assumed a dierent type of title: Figure Who Brings Bread, Figure Gazing at a House,
Figure Leaving the House, Figures Who Talk to Each Other without Seeing Each Other.
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And their installation made it clear that they were conceived of as functioning
in groups. The gures were presences, Bourgeois has said, which needed the
room, the six sides of the cube. . . . It was the reconstruction of the past. 8
Duchamps bachelor apparatus is also composed of gures typecast for
roles in societythe postman, the stationmaster, the waiter, the carriage driver,
the errand boy, etc. And these rigid personages, their heads shrunk to little points
and knobs, rest immobile in their chariot singing their litanies. Another name
for them could be gures who talk to each other without seeing each other.
They are not so much subjects, in the sense of individuals possessing independent consciousnesses, as agents within the process of the apparatus. They are a
series of connections, the connections between desiring machines.
*
If writers about Louise Bourgeoiss sculpture had, until just recently, fallen
into the habit of calling it abstract, this is partly because the critical doxa had
made abstraction a form of praise, and partly because Bourgeois encouraged
this attitude with statements like: I am not particularly aware, or interested in,
the erotic in my work. . . . I am exclusively concerned, at least consciously, with
formal perfection. . . . 9 But this tendency is the function of something else as
well; it is the unanalyzed acknowledgment of the morphological ambivalence
that grips the objects.
Take Trani Episode (197172), a work in which two accid ovoids, with
pointed tips, are superposed, the top one at right angles to its mate. Lucy Lippard
describes the strange internal contradiction of this work, calling it a phallic image
that is benignfat, nestling, almost motherly, since as she says of the forms,
one has a nipple on the end, and both look like penises. 10 What she is pointing
to is the constant impulse in Bourgeoiss work to short-circuit the logic of form
and to produce an unthinkable mutation within form in which oppositions are
collapsed to produce what Georges Bataille has termed the informe.11 Indeed, it
is precisely in analyzing Batailles novel Lhistoire de loeil (1926) that Roland
Barthes describes its manner of generating an experience of round phallicisma transgression of that formal logic which depends on the distinction
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Trani Episode, 1971. Plaster and latex, 23 1/4 x 23 1/4 x 17 inches. Robert Miller Gallery, New York.
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ously against forma decentered, amorphous, nonphallic experience of pleasureand against logos, or meaning.
The appeal of Louise Bourgeoiss work for feminism is obvious and sure.
And it is certainly the feminist pressure on the critical and art-historical establishment that has done the most to cry out against a construction of the modernist
canon such that art such as Bourgeoiss would not be given its rightful place. But
what I would like to stress is that to honor Bourgeois in the way that would
really pay her justice is to see how her works roots had, from the beginning,
spread in many directions within the art and thought of this century. They have
always tapped into many logics that a hegemonic modernism has ignored, but
that we can ignore no longer, particularly when we see how those logics combine into their own, powerfully emotive system: the part-object, the bachelor
apparatus, the confabulations of art brut, the informe, the desiring machines.
Bourgeois has been the master of all of this, and that for over four decades.
Paris, 1989
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Do you remember the hilarity, as a child, of playing the game that takes the form:
if you were a vegetable (or a color, an animal, etc.), what vegetable (color, animal) would you be? The surrealists were fond of rewriting childrens games in
the register of adult desire. I remembered that when I stumbled on the information that Agnes Martin had made a lm. Agnes Martin? A lm? If you were
Agnes Martin, I thought, and you made a lm, what lm would it be?
Zorns Lemma, I thought.
In order to achieve its peculiar transubstantiation of matter, Hollis Framptons great lm reorganizes both the real world of cinemas photographic support
and the temporal dimension of its continuous unreeling into the atemporal, nonspatial order of the grid. Zorns Lemma (1970) is, for that reason, profoundly
abstract. As its one-second-long shots present us with the regular beat of
disjunctive bits of reality, each one bearing a word discovered in the urban landscape beginning with the letter appropriate to its place in the alphabetic organization of the work, a linguistic matrix seems to settle over the visual eld.
Cycling again and again over the alphabetic groundeagle . . . hair . . . wagon
. . . yachtthe lm gradually replaces each letter with a fragment of landscape
that in this arbitrary play of substitutions takes on the character of a pure emblem,
the insubstantiality of an idea. Indeed the rst four substitute imagesreeds,
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forms melted as it were into each other. Burkes description of a perfect simplicity, an absolute uniformity in disposition, shape and coloring, his call for a
succession of uniform parts that can permit a comparatively small quantity
of matter to produce a grander eect than a much larger quantity disposed
in another manner seemed made for Martins work, just as that workas
paired down and simplied as it might appearcould be thought nonetheless
to smuggle within it diused references to the repertory of natural subjects
that followed from Burkes analysis: the sea (Turner), the sky (Constable), foliage (Church) and, simply, light. 3
It is this covert allusion to nature that the category abstract sublime has come
to imply, with the abstract work always able to be decoded by its romantic
double: Rothko read out through Friedrich; Pollock by Turners storms; Martin
by Turners skies.4
But again it has consistently been Martin herself who has cautioned against
a romantic context for her work. Repeating that she sees herself joined to an
ancient tradition of classicistsCoptic, Egyptian, Greek, Chineseshe denes this tradition as something that turns its back on nature. Classicism forsakes the nature pattern, she writes.5 Classicists are people that look out with
their back to the world/ It represents something that isnt possible in the world/
More perfection than is possible in the world/ Its as unsubjective as possible. . . .
The pointit doesnt exist in the world. 6
And this same text, written three years before Martin made Gabriel, contains an extraordinary condemnation of the trope at work in her own lm: The
classic is cool/ a classical period/ it is cool because it is impersonal/ the detached
and impersonal/ If a person goes walking in the mountains that is not detached/
and impersonal, hes just looking back.
*
In the exceedingly supercial and repetitive literature on Agnes Martin,
there is one arresting exception. It is Kasha Linvilles careful phenomenological
reading in which for the rst and only time there is a description of what it is
actually like to see the paintings, which, she explains, are sequences of illusions
of textures that change as viewing distance changes.7
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First there is the close-to reading, in which one is engaged in the works
facture and drawing, in the details of its materiality in all their sparse precision:
the irregular weave of the linen, the thickness and uniformity of the gesso, the
touch in the application of the penciled lines. Sometimes, Linville explains,
her line is sharp, as in an early painting, Flower in the Wind, 1963.
Sometimes its own shadow softens itthat is, it is drawn once beneath the pigment or gesso and then redrawn on top, as in The
Beach. Most often, her line respects the canvas grain, skimming its
surface without lling the low places in the fabric so it becomes
almost a dotted or broken line at close range. Sometimes she uses
pairs of lines that dematerialize as rapidly as the lighter-drawn single
ones. As you move back from a canvas like Mountain II, 1966, the
pairs become single, gray horizontals and then begin to disappear.8
But this moving back from the matrix of the ne grids of Martins
196067 work, as well as from the more grossly calibrated bands of her post1974 painting, is a crucial second moment in the viewing of the work. For
here is where the ambiguities of illusion take over from the earlier materiality of
a surface redoubled by the weave of Martins grids or bands; and it is at this place
that the paintings go atmospheric. Again, Linvilles description of this eect is
elegant and precise. I dont mean atmosphere in the spatially illusionistic sense
I associate with color eld painting, she writes. Rather it is a non-radiating,
impermeable mist. It feels like, rather than looks like atmosphere. Somehow, the
red lines [she is speaking here of Red Bird ] dematerialize the canvas, making it
hazy, velvety. Then, as you step back even further, the painting closes down
entirely, becoming completely opaque.
That opaqueness of the third moment, produced by a fully distant, more
objective vantage on the work, brackets the atmospheric interval of the middledistance view, closing it from behind, so to speak. Wall-like and impenetrable,
this view now disperses the earlier atmosphere. And this nal result, as Linville
again writes of Martin, is to make her paintings impermeable, immovable as
stone.
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being limited or conditioned by the unformed, which is unknowable and unrepresentable. And if the /architectural/ came to symbolize the reach of the artists
knowledge, the /cloud/ operated as the lack in the center of that knowledge,
the outside that joins the inside in order to constitute it as an inside.
Thus before being a thematic elementfunctioning in the moral and allegorical sphere as a registration of miraculous vision, or of ascension, or as the
opening onto divine space; or in the psychological sphere as an index of desire,
fantasy, hallucination; or, for that matter, before being a visual integer, the image
of vaporousness, instability, movementthe /cloud/ is a dierential marker in
a semiological system. This can be seen for example in the extent to which cloud
elements are interchangeable within the repertory of religious imagery. The
fact that an object can thus be substituted for another in the economy of the
sacred visual text, Damisch writes, this fact is instructive: the /cloud/ has no
meaning that can be properly assigned to it; it has no other value than that which
comes to it from those serial relations of opposition and substitution that it entertains with the other elements of the system. 12
Meaning, according to this argument, is then a function of a system that
underpins and produces it, a system/cloud/ vs. /built, denable space/
with its own autonomy, that of painting, which precedes the specics of either
theme or image.
*
Autonomy, of course, has come by now to have indescribably bad associations; like formalism, it is thought to be the blinkered product of ideological
construction. Yet much art has been produced within this ideology and in relation to a conception of autonomy; and the rush to move beyond the circumscribed aesthetic sphere to the hors texte, the context, the legitimating real text,
often produces supercial readings, as in the case of leaching out Agnes Martins
painting into the concealed landscapes of the abstract sublime.
But if we allow ourselves for a moment to entertain this transgressive
thought of autonomy, we come upon a position, itself the founding moment of
art history as a discipline, that sets up, along with Damischs, a model for Agnes
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Martins three distances. This is the work Alois Riegl developed over the course
of his Stilfragen (1893) and Spatromische Kunstindustrie (1901), studies that fend o
all hypotheses about the putative eect of external factors on arts developmentwhether in the material eld, as in Sempers theories of arts genesis out
of building practices; or in the eld of the real, as theories of mimesis would
have it; or due to the contingencies of history, as the barbaric invasions explanation of the supposed decline in late Roman art would imply. Instead, Riegl
posits an entirely internal or autonomous evolution, one that continues without
gap or deection from the most ancient civilizations of the Near East up
through Byzantium.
This evolution, dialectic in nature, arises from the desire, externalized
via art, to grasp things in the most objective way possible, untainted, that is, by
the merely happenstance and contingent vantage point of the viewing subject.
But in acknowledging the object in terms of almost any level of sculptural relief
(that is, in promoting an experience of its tactility), shadow is necessarily admitted into the connes of the objectshadow which, marking the position of the
spectator relative to the object, is the very index of subjectivity. The art of
antiquity, Riegl wrote, which sought as much as possible to enclose the gures
in objective, tactile borders, accordingly was bound from the very beginning to
include a subjective, optical element; this, however, gave rise to a contradiction,
the resolution of which was to pose a problem. Every attempt to solve this problem led in turn to a new problem, which was handed down to the next period,
and one might well say that the entire art history of the ancient world consists
of a developmental chain made up of such problems and their solutions. 13
The development Riegl charts goes from what he calls the haptic objectivism of the Greeksthe delineation of the clarity of the object through an appeal
to and a stimulation of the tactile associations of the viewerto the optical objectivism of Roman artin which the need to set the gure up in space as
radically freestanding led to the projection of the rear side of the body and hence
the use of the drill to excavate the relief plane. It arrives nally at the most extreme moment of this opticalism carried out in the service of the object. When
the relief plane itself becomes the object whose unity must be preserved, this
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leads, in examples Riegl drew on from late Roman decorative arts, to the construction of the object itself in terms of a kind of moire eect, with a constant
oscillation between gure and ground dependingand here is where this begins
to get interesting for Agnes Martinon where the viewer happens to be standing. Writing that now the ground is the interface, Riegl describes the fully
optical play of this phenomenon once what had formerly been background
emerges as object: The relationship of the bronze buckle alters with each movement of its wearer; what was just now the light-side can become at the next
moment shadow-side. 14
Since this gure/ground uctuation varies with the stance of the viewer
one might argue that the object, now fully dependent upon its perceiver, has
become entirely subjectivized. And indeed, although Riegl argues that this development ultimately gave rise to the subjective as a newly autonomous problem
for the history of art, one that would fulll itself in the eorts, for example, of
seventeenth-century Dutch portraitists to portray something as nonobjective as
states of attention, he does not read this late Roman moment as itself subjective.
Rather, he wants to argue, with this optical glitter organized into the very weft
of the object, it is the subject-viewer who has been fractured, having now been
deprived of the security of a unitary vantage. This is still the Kunstwollen of objectivism at work, but in the highest throes of its dialectical development. The
ligrees of late Roman relief, far from being a regression to a more ancient or
barbaric linearism, are the sublation of this aesthetic problem. The screw of
time has seemingly turned all the way back to its old position, Riegl writes,
yet in reality it has ended up one full turn higher. 15
*
Agnes Martins claim to be a classical artistalong with the full complement of Egyptians, Greeks, and Copts who make up Riegls objectivist Kunstwollenhas been in the main disbelieved by her interpreters. How can her interest
in formlessness, it is argued, be reconciled with such a claim, given classicisms
complete commitment to form? When Martin observes, approvingly, You
wouldnt think of form by the ocean, or when she says that her work is about
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merging, about formlessness, breaking down form, this is thought to underwrite the idea that she has transcended classicism for a newly ardent and romantic
attitude toward the sublime.
Yet let us take Martin at her word and allow her aliations to a classicism
that, in Riegls terms, would commit her to an objectivist vision, no matter how
optically fractured, and to a place within a development internal to the system
of art, a system within which the marker /cloud/ has a foundational role to play.
This objectivism, unfolding within the twentieth century, would itself
have to be seamed into the fully subjectivist project that was put in place following the Renaissance, a Cartesian project that has only intensied steadily into
the present. Except that at the beginning of the century, modernist painting
opened up, within an ever growing dependence of the work on the phenomenology of seeing (and thus on the subject), what we could call an objectivist
opticality, namely, an attempt to discoverat the level of pure abstraction
the objective conditions, or the logical grounds of possibility, for the purely subjective phenomenon of vision itself.
It is in this context that the grid achieves its historical importance: as the
transformer that moved painting from the subjective experience of the empirical
eld to the internal grounds of what could be called subjectivity as such, subjectivity now construed as a logic. Because the grid not only displays perfectly the
conditions of what could be called the visualthe simultaneity of visions grasp
of its eld dissolving the spatial (tactile) separation of gure against ground into
the continuous immediacy of a purely optical spreadbut also repeats the original, antique terms of a desire for objectivity and extreme clarity. Like the Egyptian relief, the grid both enforces a shadowless linearity and is projected as
though seen from no vantage at all. At least this is so in what could be called the
classical period of the modernist grid, for which Mondrian would stand as the
prime gure.
Let us say further that this attempt to grasp the logical conditions of vision
was, like the dialectic of the ancient drive toward the utterly independent object,
continually forced to include its opposite. For as the grid came to coincide more
and more closely with its material support and to begin to actually depict the
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warp and weft of textiles (not only in Annie Alberss work, but in that of a host
of followers such as Al Jensen), this supposed logic of vision became infected
by the tactile. Two of the possible outcomes of this tactilization of what Ive
been calling an objectivist opticality are (1) to materialize the grid itself, as
when Ellsworth Kelly constructs the network of Colors for a Large Wall out of
sixty-four separate canvases (nonetheless retaining the optical or the indenite
in the form of chance);16 or (2) to make the optical a function of the tactile
(kinesthetic) eld of its viewer, that is to say, the succession of those viewing
distances the observer might assume. This latter is the case with Agnes Martin.
And in her work it also remains clear that the optical, here marked as /cloud/,
emerges within a system dened by being bracketed by its two materialist and
tactile counterterms: the fabric of the grid in the near position and the wall-like
stela of the impassive, perfectly square panel in the distant view. It is this closed
system, taken as a whole, which preserveslike the moire belt bucklethe
drive toward the objective, which is to say the fundamental classicism of its
Kunstwollen.
To say all of this is, of course, impossibly outmoded, formalist, determinist,
empty. But the /cloud/ remains bracketed within its peculiar system; and it is
what Agnes Martin painted for these last thirty years. She destroyed all the rest.
Paris, 1993
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Although there are many ways to characterize the New York art world of the
1960s, all of them would probably focus on the same central experience, that of
a small, private company gone suddenly, euphorically, dizzyingly public. The
economic aspects of that image are, of course, appropriate. The consolidation of
the stylistic hegemony of the New York School converted a provincial bohemia
into a boomtown, a center of self-condent aesthetic energy on which there was
lavished money, glamour, attention. But besides its economic connotations, the
term public also carries the notion of discourse, of a collective language about the
aims, ideals, and even rules of a given enterprise, the conversion of a merely
private preoccupation into a discipline.
Discourse is the medium of, the support for, a public dialogue; and the
1960s was the time during which not only American critics but also many artists
began, with a new articulateness and power, to write and to speak. Since the
nature of this speech was public, the vehicle used for this discourse was that
of the art magazines, of which one in particular seemed by the mid-1960s to
concentrate this speech most insistently, and that oneArtforumfor a time
became the center and the medium of art world discourse.
In May 1970 Eva Hesse entered that world of discourse through one
simple stroke: an image of her work Contingent lled the cover of Artforum, and
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a relatively unknown artist was suddenly acknowledged as having a voice of extraordinary authority. Of all the works generated through the decade of the sixties, Contingent is surely one of the most masterful and moving, and it was this
mastery and expressiveness that was immediately revealed through the color reproduction on that cover, an instantaneous recognition that surely could never
have happened had it not been prepared for by ten years of public debate. Authority is the consequence of discourse, of the setting up of a problematic within
and against which a dominant voice can establish itself. Authority cannot be a
merely private aair.
But here we move into one of the many paradoxes that characterize the
work of Eva Hesse. For the voice of authority that spoke through the image of
Contingent was delivering the message of privacy, of a retreat from language, of
a withdrawal into those extremely personal reaches of experience that are beyond, or beneath, speech.
The human voice makes sounds. These sounds, we could say, are mere
acoustical matter. In order for that matter even to begin to perform the function
of language it must be segmented, cut up into those distinct portions that will
serve as the carriers, the formal integers of a given speech. English, for example,
discards many of the glottal sounds that other languages retain. So for English
speakers these sounds exist at the level of raw acoustical matter, at what is practically the condition of noise. What the image of Contingent was delivering to the
art world was a declaration about the expressive power of matter itself, of matter
held down to a level of the subarticulate. In art-historical terms we could say that
Contingent was countering the formalist dialogue of the 1960s with the message
of expressionism.
That, we could say, is the legacy of Eva Hesses workthe thing she communicated to the generation that followed herand if one speaks of legacy here,
one does so literally, for the month of Hesses entry into the consciousness of a
wider public for art was the month of her death at the age of thirty-four. Hesses
expressionism, manifested through an experience of matter itself, had the liberating quality of Dr. Johnsons kicking the stone and crying, out of exasperation
over the bottomless idealism of Berkeleys argument, I refute it thus. Hesses
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Contingent, 1969. Fiberglass, polyester resin, and latex over cheesecloth, each of eight units,
114168 x 3648 inches. Australian National Gallery, Canberra.
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expressionism carried the message that by kicking hard into the stone of inert
matter, one would break through to an experience of the self, a self that will
imprint its image into the heart of that matter.
Another way of saying this is that although Hesses work takes the form of
large expanses of dense coagulations and snarls of matterof latex, of berglass,
of cord, of plasticthe impression that forms through that matter is one of an
extraordinary originality, as though this matter, in its preformal condition, were
a reection of the self as unmediated, preformalized origin, as the purest and
most authentic source of feeling. The authority of Contingent derived from its
assertion of originality, and the claim it made for the aesthetics of originary experience, of the self as origin. Most of the rhetoric that surrounds Hesses work
returns again and again to this experience of it as personal, private, original.
But here again, with this claim and our assent to itfor Contingents
aective quality does lie in its originalitywe approach another of the paradoxes of Hesses work. For Hesses art depends, to an extreme degree, on the
aesthetic discourse of the 1960s, on that public debate through which the notions of minimalism were articulated both in writing and in objects: notions of
serial order and modular repetition; notions of architectural scale and scaolding,
by means of lattices and grids. Sans II (1968), Hesses monumental, modular
frieze is unthinkable without the precedents of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and
Ellsworth Kelly. Accretion (1968), with its repetition of tubular poles leaning
against a wall, and Vinculum I (1969), in which a slablike form is also positioned
by leaning, are both conditioned by certain minimalist objectsone thinks of
the leaning slabs of John McCracken or of Dan Flavins installations of uorescent tubing. Accession II (1969), a ve-sided cube, its interior tufted with rubber
tubing, begins in the work of Judd, Robert Morris, and most important, Sol
LeWitt. And with Hang Up (1966), the empty, six-foot, swaddled frame from
which a single line of wrapped metal loops out onto the oor, we feel not only
the experience of Flavins open, luminous corner frames, but behind that, Jasper
Johnss ironic display of the empty stretcher in Canvas (1956) or his projection
of wire elements from at, wall-like surfaces in work like No (1961) or In Memory
of My Feelings (1961).
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Accession II, 1969. Galvanized steel and plastic tubing, 30 3/4 x 30 3/4 x 30 3/4 inches.
Detroit Institute of Arts, Founders Society Purchase.
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Right After, 1969. Casting resin over berglass cord and wire hooks, 60 x 216 x 48 inches. Milwaukee Art
Museum, Gift of Friends of Art.
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in the way Holbein does; the deaths head is shown as continuous with the system of visibility that presents all the rest of the contents of a given painting to
view. But Holbeins Ambassadors is precisely about the eclipse of that system of
visibility. It insists that there are two dierent, mutually exclusive vantages: the
one within the world from which death is not visible; and the one outside, or
at an angle to it, from which death is seen because the world is not. And what
is continually seen in the Ambassadors is precisely the condition of this mutual
eclipse.
There is a way in which Contingents own double perspective is something
like that of anamorphosis. From the front, the view is of the elements edges
with their sculptural condition eclipsing that of the pictorial; from a raking angle,
ones perception is of the surfaces of the banners and the planarity of the rectangular elds, a perception that foregrounds the pictorial aspect of the experience.
The problematic here is obviously very dierent from that of Holbeins Ambassadors. In Contingent, as in Hesses work in general, the issue is that of the mutual
eclipse of the conventions, or institutions, of painting and sculpture as separate
modalities of experience.
The discourse of sixties aesthetics had of course been leading in this direction. It had been focused on justifying or legitimating the internal structure of a
given worka structure made visible by the articulations of a surface by drawing
or of a three-dimensional object by the separation of its partsby means other
than those of mimesis or illusion. In this way the minimalist aesthetic came to
be deeply engaged with the condition of the literal, with the purging of illusion
from the work of art by making everything about it external. Illusionism depends
on the convention of the inside of a work of art, on a space it does not share
with that of the rest of the world. Literalism was an attempt to make the work,
whether sculpture or painting, stop at its surface. In order to do this, all divisions
of the surface had to be experienced as the actual separations of the material of
the surface: for example, the colored areas in a painting by Ellsworth Kelly
change because the canvas panel that bears a given color literally comes to an
end and another one begins; or again, the drawing in a oor sculpture by Carl
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Andre is a real function of the separateness of each square or tile of metal. More
than anything else minimalism was focused on surface, and where the surface
stops, which is edge.
The most powerful and continuous element of Eva Hesses work comes
from the way it concentrates on this condition of edge, the way it makes the
edge more aective and imperious by materializing it. In this way, the edge that
is displayed by Hesse is not focused on the boundaries within a painting or a
sculpture, but rather on the boundary that lies between the institutions of painting
and sculpture. In the language of anamorphosis, we could say we are positioned
at the edge from which the meaning of death is understood literally as the condition of the world disappearing from view.
In Hesses work the gravitational eld of either painting or sculpture is
always experienced as shifting. Things begin on the wall and end on the oor,
or on the wall adjacent to the one where they started. Things lean from oor to
wall; or they begin stretched out on the horizontal plane only to turn the corner
and snake up onto the vertical one. This focus on the boundaries, on what is at
the edges of either an object or a convention, is what Hesse shares with the
discourse out of which she made her art. But where she carried her art to a point
at some distance from that discourse was in showing that from the position at
the edgethe boundary between those two formalized conventionsthere
emerges an experience of matter that is both bewildering and beautiful.
Hesses work is in that sense a kind of reinvention for her own time of the
anamorphotic condition: the condition in which form and matter are given the
real possibility of eclipsing one another, and within which one experiences
the pity and terror of that eclipse.
New York, 1979
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and words but of a photograph and its depictions. It is a magazine cover of Paris
Match in which a black soldier is shown giving the French salute. The photographas physical object, with its areas of dark and lightis the signier; the
depicted elements are the signied. They combine into the sign: a black soldier
giving the French salute. That combination then becomes the support for the
mythical content that is not just a message about French imperialismFrance
is a global nation; there are black subjects who also serve itbut a message
about its naturalness, as the signied of the rst order of the mythic support is
called up as an example to ll up and instance its mythic contention: Imperialism is not oppressive; it is natural, because we are all one humanity; you see!
examples of how it works and the loyalty it engages can be found everywhere,
anywhere, for example, in this photograph where a black soldier gives the
French salute. The you see! part of the message is, of course, the interpellant
part. It is the myth summoning its consumer to grasp the meaningfulness of the
rst order signthe photograph-as-signiedand then to project his or her
conviction in that unitary, simple meaning, onto the more complex, hazy, insinuating level of the contents of the myth.
So lets go back to Sherman and the Rashomon-factor: the critic sitting
there in the darkened auditorium of the School of Visual Arts, looking at a set
of slide comparisons and believing something about their replicative relationship,
believing this to be the case because after all Shermans work, he is certain, takes
us back in any event to the real lm we remember. What is crucial here is that
he has bought the pitch and never thought to look under the hood. He has taken
the rst order sign as a composite, a signier and signied already congealed into
a nished meaningactress X in lm Yand he has completed the mythical
content. Here it would be something like: Cindy Sherman is an artist and artists
imitate reality (Universal Truth No. 1), doing so through their own sensibilities,
and thus adding something of themselves to it (Universal Truth No. 2). The
formula we come out with was penned by Emile Zola. It goes: Art is important;
it gives us a piece of nature seen through a temperament. Nature in the Sherman
case would be of a somewhat technological kind, namely, the original lm role,
which Sherman would pass through the temperament of her own memory and
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projection; she would externalize this observed and felt bit of the world, and her
work of artthe externalization of these emotionswill be her expression,
with which we as viewers can empathize. Art Emotion relayed through nature. Thats the myth and thats why the critic has to produceno matter
through what process of self-deception or hallucinationthe original, the bit
of nature, the lmic heroine in her role. Thats what its like to be a myth consumer. To buy the pitch. To fail to look under the hood.
What, then, is under the hood?
What is always under the hood is the signier, the material whose very
articulation conditions the signied. And further, working away under the hood,
either on or with the signier, is the eort perhaps to limit the possibility that it
might produce a multiplicity of unstable signieds and promote a sliding among
them or, on the other hand, to do the reverse and welcome, even facilitate such
sliding. Limitation is the work of realism in novels and lms: to every signier
one and only one signied.5 Conversely, sliding and proliferation has always interested the antirealist (what used to be called the avant-garde) artist.6
Work on the signier is perfectly available for observation in Shermans
Untitled Film Stills. Take the group of images that includes #21, #22, and #23.
In all three, Sherman wears the same costume, a dark, tailored suit with a white
collar and a small straw cloche pulled onto a mop of short blond curls. But everything else changes from one still to the next: as in the rst, #21, the register is
close-up taken at a low angle; in the second, #22, a long shot intricates the
character amid a complication of architectural detail and the cross re of sun and
shadow; and the last, #23, frames the gure in medium shot at the far right
side of the image against the darkened emptiness of an undened city street and
attened by the use of a wide-angle lens. And with each reframing and each new
depth-of-eld and each new condition of luminosity, the character transmogries, moving from type to type and from movie to movie. From #21 and the
Hitchcock heroine to #23 and the hardened lm noir dame, there is no acting
involved.7 Almost every single bit of the characterwhich is to say, of each of
the three dierent charactersis a function of work on the signier: the various
things that in lm go to make up a photographic style.
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It was just this that Judith Williamson, one of the early feminist writers on
Shermans work, described when she said that in the stills, we are constantly
forced to recognize a visual style (often you could name the director) simultaneously with a type of femininity. The two cannot be pulled apart. The image
suggests that there is a particular kind of femininity in the woman we see, whereas
in fact the femininity is in the image itself, it is the image. 8
This fact that there is no free-standing character, so to speak, but only a
concatenation of signiers so that the persona is releasedconceived, embodied, establishedby the very act of cutting out the signiers, making her a
pure function of framing, lighting, distance, camera angle, and so forth, is what
you nd when you look under the hood. And Sherman as de-myth-ier is specically allowing us, encouraging us to look under the hood, even as she is also
showing us the tremendous pull to buy into the mythwhich is to say, to accept
the signied as nished fact, as free-standing gure, as character. Thus there is
the tendency when speaking of the lm stills to enumerate their personae, either
as the rolesa woman walking down a dark street at night; another, scantily
clad, with martini in hand, peering out the sliding glass door of a cheap motel 9 or as the actresses who project them: Gina Lollabrigida, Monica Viti,
Barbara Bel Geddes, Lana Turner . . .
That neither the roles nor the actresses are free-standing, that all are,
within representation, eectsoutcomes, functionsof the signiers that
body them forth is what Barthes labored to demonstrate in his extraordinary
book S/Z, an analysis of the inner workings of literary realism. Showing that
each character is produced through a concatenation of separate codessome
the signiers or operators of dierence, whether of gender (male/female) or age
(young/old) or position (rich/poor); others the operators of references to general
knowledge keyed into the text by the merest aside (as in the Arabian Nights);
still others the operators of the puzzle that drives the narrative forward toward
its Truth (who is? what is?)what Barthes makes clear is that when a name
nally arrives to refer to or denote a character, that name is buoyed up, carried
along, by the underlying babble of the codes.10 The name is thus the signied
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the characterthat the author slides onto the codes to produce realisms appearance that for every name there is a referent, a denotation, a unied empirical
fact. What is being masked is that the name, rather than pointing to a primary
entity in the real, is an eect of the vast already-written, already-heard,
already-read of the codes; it, the denotation, is merely the last of these codes to
be slipped into place. The consumer of realist ction, however, buys the pitch
and believes in the character, believes in the substance of the person from
whom all the rest seems to follow as a set of necessary attributes, believes, that
is, in the myth.
Most of those who write about the Film Stills acknowledge that Sherman
is manipulating stereotypes and that though these are being relayed through a
generalized matrix of lmic portrayals and projections, there is of course no real
lm, no original, to which any one of them is actually referring. So the myth
consumer of my opening anecdote is something of an exception and in that sense
a straw man. And yet we have not far to look to nd other versions of myth
consumption, or the direct connection to the signied-as-instance.
One form of this that can be found in the mountainous literature on Shermans work is to assume that each of these signieds is being oered as an instance of Shermans own deeper selfthe artist (as in Universal Truth No. 2,
above) becoming the vehicle through which the fullness of humanity might be
both projected and embraced in all its aspects. Peter Schjeldahl, for example,
understands the individual Film Stills signied to be Shermans fantasy of herself
in a certain role, redolent usually of some movie memory, with all the dierent
characters resonating together to form the totality of the artists selfhood in her
oracular role as our representative: Shermans special genius has been to locate
the oracle not in the out there of media bombardment but in the in here of
her own partly conditioned, partly original minda dense, rich sediment of
half-remembered, half-dreamed image tones and fragments. . . . She has mined
this sediment for ideas, creating an array of new, transpersonal images that spark
across the gap between self and culture. 11 The mythic content Schjeldahl then
consumes from these instances of the self-as-oracle is that it is in the nature of
the artist to organize messages that seem to tell us our nature and our fate.
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It was Mulveys own 1975 text, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,
that most formatively set out that latter argument in which woman is constructed
as spectacle and symptom, becoming the passive object of a male gaze. Which is
to say that in her essay a relation is set up among three terms: (1) the observation
that there are gender distinctions between the roles that men and women play in
lmsmales being the agents of the narratives action; females being the passive
objects or targets of that narrative, often interrupting the (masculine) action by
the stasis of a moment of formal (feminine) opulence; (2) the conception that
there is a gender assignment for the viewers of lms, one that is unrelentingly
male since the very situation of lmic viewing is structured as voyeuristic and
fetishistic, its source of pleasure being essentially an eroticization of fetishism:
the determining male gaze projects its fantasy onto the female gure, which is
styled accordingly, she writes; and (3) that these assignments of role are a function of the psychic underpinnings of all men and women, since they reect the
truths about the unconscious construction of gendered identity that psychoanalysis has brought to light: Woman . . . stands in patriarchal culture as signier
for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his
fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command, by imposing them on the
silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker
of meaning. 18
In that last sentence, which slides from the domain of lmic representations to the universal condition of how woman stands in patriarchal culture,
there are packed a large number of theoretical assumptions that knot together
around concepts about the unconscious, castration, and the import of structural
linguistics for psychoanalysis. Insofar as Shermans work is implicated in those
assumptions and the analysis about woman-as-image that ows from themthe
Film Stills, for example, repeatedly presented as either a text to be explained by
this analysis and/or a consequence of itit is necessary to unpack these assumptions, no matter how schematically.
The psychic economy that drives men to activity and speech and women
to passivity and silence is an economy that also separates looking from being
looked at, spectator from spectacle. And that economy is organized, according
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The fetish constructed through this mechanism of denial thus restores to her
body what is known to be missing.
If lm works constantly to re-create woman as a symptom of mans castration anxietythus silencing herit also works, and here even harder, to situate
her as eroticized fetish: the image of lack papered over, the emblem of wholeness
restored. Woman is in this sense skewered in place as an image that simultaneously establishes her as other than manthe Truth that it is he who possesses
the phallusand at the same time the fetishized image of the whole body from
which nothing is missing.
Stephen Heath describes this visual scenario from the point of view of the
gazing male subjectEverything turns on the castration complex and the central phallus, its visibility and the spectacle of lack; the subject, as Lacan puts it at
one point, looks at itself in its sexual memberand then for the consequences
for the woman secured as spectacle:
What the voyeur seeks, poses, is not the phallus on the body of the
other but its absence as the denition of the mastering presence, the
security, of his position, his seeing, his phallus; the desire is for
the other to be spectacle not subject, or only the subject of that same
desire, its exact echo. . . . Fetishism too, which often involves the
scopophilic drive, has its scenario of the spectacle of castration; and
where what is at stake is not to assert that the woman has the penisphallus but to believe in the intact, to hold that the woman is not
castrated, that nothing is lost, that his representation, and of him,
works. Always, from voyeurism to fetishism, the eroticization of
castration.22
It is with this theoretical armature in place, then, that Laura Mulvey herself
looks at the Film Stills, understanding them to be rehearsing this structure of
the male gaze, of the voyeurist constructing the woman in endless repetitions of
her vulnerability and his control: The camera looks; it captures the female
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woman appears to be in a bathroom and once again she is scantily dressed, wearing only a thin nightgown. Yet the continuity established by the focal length of
the lens creates an unimpeachable sense that her look at herself in the mirror
reaches past her reection to include the viewer as well. Which is to say that as
opposed to the idea of /distance/, there is here the signied /connection/, and
what is further cut out as the signied at the level of narrative is a woman chatting
to someone (perhaps another woman) in the room outside her bathroom as she
is preparing for bed.
The narrative impact of these images tends to submerge the elements
through which it is constructed, elements such as depth-of-eld, grain, light,
etc. which, it would seem, are too easy to dismiss as merely formal integers,
whereas they function as signiers crucial to the semantic eect. That Sherman
is concentrated on these aspects is made very palpable in the one Film Still that
seems inexplicable within the series as a whole: #36 (1979). Of all the Stills this
one is so severely backlit that nothing can be seen of the characters face and
almost nothing of her body beyond its silhouette. Standing in front of a curtain
through which the powerful backlighting is dramatically diused, she extends
one of her arms upward almost out of frame; the other bends to grasp the elbow
of the rst in what could be a gesture of washing but remains radically ambiguous. As pattern her body reads black on the white of the ground, and her garmentsthe bodice of her slip and the stiened lm of a crinolineparted
slightly from her body, create the only area of modulation or middle tone in the
image. To a far greater degree than almost any other in the series, this work is
deprived of narrative implication.
A few months prior to the making of this Still, an imageor rather two
imagesremarkably like it were published: two photographs by Edgar Degas,
of a ballerina dressed in a low-cut bodice, her skirt a diaphanous crinoline, standing in front of a luminous curtain and reaching with one arm upward, her other
arm bent inward at the elbow. These photographs, published by a critic who just
a few months later would launch Sherman in an essay called Pictures, an article
providing the rst serious critical context for her work (Shermans rst solo
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exhibition was still one year away), are related to one another through an extraordinary ambiguity with regard to light.24 For having solarized the negative
of his photograph to create reversals between negative and positive areas within
the image, Degas then created both a negative and a positive print. And the
dark/light reversals that arise from this treatment constitute the dancer as a phantom whose existence can be located nowhere. As Douglas Crimp described it:
In the print in which the right arm and torso of the dancer appears
to be normally positive, the shadow of the arm on the wall she grasps
appears as a streak of light. Her face, also apparently in shadow, and
her dark hair are registered as light. At this point, obviously, language begins to fail. How can we any longer speak of light and dark?
How can we speak of a white shadow? a dark highlight? a translucent
shoulder blade? When light and dark, transparency and opacity, are
reversed, when negative becomes positive and positive, negative, the
referents of our descriptive language are dissolved. We are left with
a language germane only to the photographic, in which the manipulation of light generates its own, exclusive logic.25
And in the publication of the twinned Degas photographs, the same dancer turns
to confront her own mirror image as, ipped from negative to positive, she is
also ipped left and right. Folded in a way almost impossible to imagine around
the axis of her own body, that body is folded as well around a ghostly condition
of luminosity that produces it now as solid, now as if in X-ray.
Shermans Untitled Film Still #36, in its condition of being hors serie, has
also the aura of this impossibly folded Degas dancer, turning in a light that has
no focus, and indeed no possible external point of view. Perhaps the Still was
addressed, imaginatively, to Crimp; but such an address has nothing in it of the
theorization of the male gaze and the psycho-politics of sadistic control. Further,
as we will see, this kind of backlighting, and all that it does to fragment the gaze,
will emerge as a crucial elementor signierin Shermans work of the early
1980s. But that is to anticipate somewhat, getting ahead of our story.
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T H
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scenes like these from movies and televisionabout her prospects for romance 27 the accounts of the series go straight for the mythic content: Shermans ability to get inside her characters. What is instantly recognizable in
Shermans new pictures is the universal state of daydream or reverie, the moments of harmless, necessary psychosis that are a recurring mechanism in anyones mental economy. These are moments when consciousness dissolves back
into itself, when wish and reality, personal and collective memory are one and
the physical world ceases to exist. 28
Mulvey, also, focuses on the characters and their interiors: The young
women that Sherman impersonates may be daydreaming about a future romance, or they may be mourning a lost one. They may be waiting, in enforced
passivity, for a letter or telephone call. Their eyes gaze into the distance. They
are not aware of their clothes, which are sometimes carelessly rumpled, so that,
safe alone with their thoughts, their bodies are, slightly, revealed to the viewer.
Referring to this eect as soft-core pastiche and associating the horizontal format of the images to the shape of a cinemascope screen, Mulveys reading returns
to the woman-as-image question, the construction of the eroticized fetish.
These photographs reiterate the to-be-looked-at-ness of femininity, she
writes, pointing to the way the connotations of intimacy both at the level emotiondaydream, fantasyand of settingthe bedroomcombine to exude a
strong sense of sexuality. And even though the voyeuristic place of the spectator
is not marked here, as it has been in the Film Stills, she says, the issue of womanas-spectacle, woman-as-symptom has not changed. It has merely been reconditioned to concentrate on the mechanism of masquerade: the posturing projected
outward from an empty center. It is in this series, she writes, that the works
start to suggest an interior space, and initiate [Shermans] exploration inside the
masquerade of femininitys interior/exterior binary opposition. 29
It was in his essay The Meaning of the Phallus that Jacques Lacan had
formulated masquerade as this desperate binary, pronouncing: Paradoxical as
this formulation might seem, I would say that it is in order to be the phallus, that
is to say, the signier of the desire of the Other, that a woman will reject an
essential part of femininity, namely all its attributes via masquerade. 30 Thus, if
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the picture orients itself to the wall, it is also, as we have seen, the axis of the plane
of vision. That plane, which the Gestalt psychologists characterize as insistently
fronto-parallel to the upright body of the viewer, is as well, they tell us, the
plane of Pragnanz, by which they mean the hanging together or coherence of
form. Thus the very drive of vision to formulate form, to project coherence in
a mirroring of the bodys own shape, will already mark even the empty vertical
plane as a reection of that body, heavier at the bottom, lighter at the top, and
with a dierent orientation from right side to left. And conversely any location of
formof shape or of gurewill assume its place in an axis that is imaginatively
vertical, even if we confront it on the page of the magazine we hold on our laps
or in the tiles of the mosaic that lies under our feet.
Further, this vertical dimension, in being the axis of form, is also the axis
of beauty. That is what Freud adds to the Gestaltists picture: in that period in
his evolution when man nally stood up, he left the world of sning and pawing, with nose pressed to genitals, and entered the world of vision in which
objects were now experienced as being at a distance. And in this distancing his
carnal instincts were sublimated, Freud writes, reorganized away from the organ
world of the horizontal and into the formal world of the vertical, which is to say,
of the beautiful.34
It was not just modernist painting, which formed part of Shermans heritage as an artist, that insisted on this verticalityand its eect of sublimation; it
was also the media universe of movies and television and advertising that declared it. And these two elds, so seemingly inimical to one another, had a bizarrely complementary relation to this eect of sublimation. If the medias fetish
occupied the axis of the vertical, that very axis had itself become the fetish of
high art.
During the 1960s and 1970s, however, a series of blows had been struck
against this fetish. There were, to take only one example, a group of readings
of the work of Jackson Pollockitself a dominant emblem of the sublimatory
condition of the vertical, optically conditioned, pictorial eldthat deantly
reinterpreted Pollocks painting as horizontal. This was true of Andy Warhols
Oxidation paintings through which he read Pollocks dripped pictures as the
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work of a urinary trace (as though made by a man standing over a supine eld
and peeing), thus insisting on the way Pollocks canvases are permanently marked
by the horizontality of their making. It was also true of Robert Morriss felts and
scatter pieces, through which he reinterpreted Pollocks enterprise as antiform, by which he meant its condition of having yielded to gravity in assuming
the axis of the horizontal. It can also be said that it was true of Ed Ruschas Liquid
Word pictures, with their reading of the signicance of the drip technique as
opening onto the dimension of entropy and base materialism. 35
If this sequence is invoked here it is to give one a sense of the connotations
of the /horizontal/ within the eld of the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s
as certain artists opposed the /vertical/ within which is inscribed all forms of
sublimation, whether that be of the beautiful or of the fetish. It is to see the work
already in place on the pictorial signier once it operates in terms of the failure
to resist the pull of gravity, of the pivoting out of the axis of form.
In the horizontals Shermans work is joined to this tradition. That desublimation is part of what she is encoding by means of the /horizontal/ will
become unmistakably clear by the end of the 1980s with what are sometimes
politely referred to as the bulemia pictures, namely, images in which the horizontal plane occupied by the point of view is forcibly associated with vomit,
mold, and all forms of the excrementalbase materialism, indeed. But in
these works of 1981 it is already clear that the view downward is desublimatory.
In Untitled #92 the narrative operated by this signier is not that of vulnerability via a pose that is soft and limp, but rather of animality, the body clenched
in a kind of subhuman xation. And in Untitled #91 the network of cast shadows
that grids the body and face of the woman projects over the image a sense of
decay and of death. It is as though something were working against the forces
of form and of life, attacking them, dissolving them, disseminating them into the
eld of the horizontal.
The theory of the male gaze, even as it moves from an analysis of the
operations of a representational eldmovies, paintingsto a generalization
about the structure of human consciousness, has had to blind itself to its own
fetishization of the vertical. Which is to say that it has had to blind itself to any-
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thing outside the vertical register of the image/form.36 It is because of this that
the theorists of the gaze repeat, at the level of analysis, the very xity they are
describing as operating the male gaze at the level of its social eects. And the
symptom of this repetition is the constant submission to the meaning-eect the
system generates, a submission to be found in Mulveys steady consumption of
Shermans work as myth.
G R
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This texture, in keeping, as Mulvey writes, with the codes and conventions of commercial photography, is glossiness, the product of a kind of reective veneer. It is this shiny surface that Burgin in his turn had related to the
fetishized glanz, or gleam, that Freud had described in his essay outlining the
unconscious mechanics of the construction of the fetish.39
Now while it is true that shininess functions as a certain kind of support
for media imagesand not just those of photography but even more insistently
of backlit advertising panels and lm and television screensit is also true that
Sherman performs specic work on this phenomenon. Just as she had taken a
horizontal formatborrowed both from centerfold photographs and from cinemascope screensand worked on it to produce a signier that (in opposition to
the meaning of the /vertical/) would cut out a specic signiedthe /horizontal-as-lowness, -as-baseness/so, here as well, the gleam is submitted to
sustained investigation.
One of the last of the horizontals, Untitled #95, had announced this attention to the gleam. It is of a woman sitting upright on a bed (and thus no longer
aligned with the horizontal axis of the format), caught in a strong glow of backlighting, so that her hair, now recongured as an intensely luminous nimbus,
displaces the focus away from her face. As Shermans work advances into the
1980s it repeats this kind of backlighting, forcing a glow to emerge from the
ground of the image to advance outward at the viewer and thus to disrupt conditions of viewing, producing the gure herself as a kind of blind spot. We nd it
again, for example, in Untitled #139 (1984).
But although backlighting is a very direct signier for this sense of a
diracted and dispersed visual eld, it is not the only means to produce it. Indeed
it could be said that a certain eect of wild light, the scattering of gleams
around the otherwise darkened image as though refracting it through the facets
of an elaborate jewel, will also create this corrosive visual dispersal. An early
example of such wild light immediately followed the last of the horizontals, in
Untitled #110 (1982), where Sherman has concentrated on creating a sense of
the completely aleatory quality of the illumination. For while the lighting
plunges three quarters of the eld into total blackness, it picks out the arm and
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point from which the subject sees himself seeing. Instead, to depict this luminous
gaze, which makes of the subject a speculum mundi, Lacan turns to the model of
animal mimicry, which his old friend Roger Caillois had described back in the
1930s as the eect of space at large on a subject (-insect) who, yielding to the
force of this spaces generalized gaze, loses its own organic boundaries and
merges with its surrounds in an almost psychotic act of imitation.42 Making itself
into a kind of shapeless camouage, this mimetic subject now becomes a part of
the picture of space in general: It becomes a stain, it becomes a picture, it is
inscribed in the picture, Lacan insists.43 But if Caillois had been describing animal behavior, Lacan elaborates this eect for the human subject as well. Telling
an anecdote about himself caught in an indenable beam of light reected o a
sardine can, Lacan draws the conclusion:
I am taking the structure at the level of the subject here, and it reects something that is already to be found in the natural relation
that the eye inscribes with regard to light. I am not simply that punctiform being located at the geometral point from which the perspective is grasped. No doubt, in the depths of my eye, the picture is
painted. The picture, certainly, is in my eye. But I, I am in the
picture.44
The sliding back and forth between Cailloiss insect and Lacans I in this
discussion of mimicry is important to what Lacan wants to get at by this notion
of gaze. For Caillois had insisted that the insect cannot be shown to assume its
camouage for purposes of adaptationand thus what could be seen as coming
from an intentional, subjective ground (no matter how instinctual or unconscious)but simply as matter owing into other matter, a mere body yielding to
the call of space. Lacan joins this same position when he says, Mimicry reveals
something insofar as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind, which is to say, distinct from a subjective ground of the subject.45 Rather,
we pass into the picture as mere stain, which is to say as physical matter, as
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body. And here Lacan also refers to Merleau-Pontys position in The Phenomenology of Perception that our relation to spaceinsofar as it is the target of the gaze
constituted by the luminous surround, a light that catches us in its beam from
behind as well as from in frontfounds our perception not in the transparency
of a conceptual grasp of space (as in the geometral) but in the thickness and
density of the body that simply intercepts the light.46
It is in this sense that to be in the picture is not to feel interpellated by
societys meaningits me!is not to feel, that is, whole; it is to feel dispersed,
subject to a picture organized not by form but by formlessness. The desire awakened by the impossibility of occupying all those multiple points of the luminous
projection of the gaze is a desire that founds the subject in the realization of a
point of view that is withheld, one(s) that he or she cannot occupy. And it is the
very fragmentation of that point of view that prevents this invisible, unlocatable gaze from being the site of coherence, meaning, unity, gestalt, eidos. Desire
is thus not mapped here as the desire for form, and thus for sublimation (the
vertical, the gestalt, the law); desire is modeled in terms of a transgression against
form. It is the force invested in desublimation.47
Nowhere is the notion of having become the picture more searingly
evoked than in Shermans Untitled #167 (1986), where the camouage eect is
in full ower. The gure, now absorbed and dispersed within the background,
can only be picked out by a few remnants still visible, though only barely, in the
mottled surface of the darkened detritus that lls the image. We make out the
tip of a nose, the emergence of a nger with painted nail, the detached grimace
of a set of teeth. Horizontalized, the view downward mapped by the image puts
the signier of the dissolution of the gestalt in place. But as it reaches the bottom
edge of the image, the spectators view encounters a gaze that projects toward it
from within this matrix of near-invisibility. Reected in the tiny mirror of a
discarded compact, this gaze cannot be identied with any source in the image.
Instead it seems to join all the other gleams and reected points of light in the
image to constellate the signier for the /unlocatable/, and thus for the transgression of the gestalt.
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Throughout the late 1980s Sherman continued to gure this eld of the
unlocatable gaze by means of Gleams and Reections. And now the bouncing
light of these opaquely slippery, arborescent signiers is more consistently married to the /horizontal/, both combining in a drive toward the desublimation of
the image. In Untitled #168 (1987) a glowing but imageless television screen
joins the repertory of gleams. In Untitled #176 (1987) the refractive surface of
water sparkling upward to meet the downwardly focused view of the spectator,
projects the multiple points of light with all the ambiguity of the jewel that
produces not the beautiful of sublimation but the formless pulsation of desire.
T O M
The core of [Leonardos] nature, and the secret of it, would appear
to be that after his curiosity had been activated in infancy in the
service of sexual interests he succeeded in sublimating the greater
part of his libido into an urge for research.
Sigmund Freud48
In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud speaks of the sexual
instincts of children as relentlessly and repetitively driving them toward what
they want to know but dare not ask, and what they want to see but dare not
uncover behind the garments that conceal it. This drive, which is sexual, does
not cause pleasure for the child, but to the contrary, nonpleasure in view of the
direction of the subjects development. Therefore to ward o this nonpleasure,
a defense against the drive sets in, in the form of disgust, shame, and morality.
This defense Freud calls reaction-formation.
But parallel to this is another defense against the force of the drive, namely,
that of sublimation. This occurs when the drive is forced to change its course by
shifting its object. Thus the sexual instinct can be diverted (sublimated) in the
direction of art, if its interest can be shifted away from the genitals on to the
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shape of the body as a whole. This shift is, as we know, away from the libidinal
and on to the beautiful of form.49
In 1989 and 1990 Sherman turned her own attention to Art, which is to
say, rmly and steadily toward the most overt and pronounced version of the
scene of sublimation. The very term high that modies art (either explicitly or
implicitly) announces this sublimatory eect as having had its origin in a gesture
of raising ones eyes to the plane of the vertical and of thereby acceding to the
eld of the gestalt. And Shermans Old Master pictures revel in forming again
and again the signiers of the form that high art celebrates, signiers of verticality
meshing with signiers of the unitariness of the gestalt.
Premiere among these, of course, is the signier constellated by the frame.
For the frame is what produces the boundary of the work of art as something
secreted away from ordinary space-at-large, thereby securing the work of arts
autonomy; and at the same time the frames contour echoes the conditions of
boundary and closure that are the very foundations of form.
Sometimes the frame enters the eld of the aesthetic image through nothing more complex than the black background that cushions and cradles the gure, emphasizing its shape by contrast, a shape that in its turn is often constructed
as a set of miniaturized echoes of the larger, enclosing frame. These internalized
echoes might appear in the encircling oval formed by the gures arms, meeting
in a gesture of self-embrace. Or they may be the result of the U of a bodice that
frames the head and upper torso, or the encircling O of a turban that frames the
face. Sometimes the frame is projected by more scenographic elements: painted
curtains that part to make a space for the gure; or even the depiction of an
actual frame behind the gurethe ornate frame of a mirror, perhaps, in which
the gure can now be doubly enfolded, rst by the actual frame of the painting
as a whole, and second by the depicted frame that captures and embraces the
gures double.
Two of the very famous Old Master images that Sherman stages represent
the extremes of these possibilities, from most simple to most elaborate. Her version of La Fornarina, the portrait of Raphaels mistress (Untitled #205 [1989]),
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presents us with the rst alternative, while her strangely composite projection of
several of Ingress most celebrated sittersMadame Rivie`re, Madame de Senonines, and Madame Moitessier (Untitled #204 [1989])confronts us with the
second. In this last the signiers of internal framing are piled one upon the other
as drapery, gesture, and mirror encircle the projected body in a giddy enactment
of frames-within-frames.
Further, another rather disturbing signier enters this theater of the
/vertical/ to point to still one more meaning of high in the conception of high
art. This signier, a function of the way these Old Master personages are constructed by Sherman thanks to fake body parts that are strapped onto her torso
or applied to her head, marks the surface of the image as a mask or veil, one that
can supposedly be removed, pushed aside, seen behind. In their very detachability, these elements point thus to the hermeneutic dimension of the work of art:
the idea that it possesses an inner truth or meaning to which the interpreter
might penetrate. In being a hermeneutic object the work of art thus occupies
the high position not as vertical to horizontal but as ideal to material, or as
mind to body.
And yet it is also in the obviousness of the condition of these body parts
as prostheses that they work against the conception of the veil with its hidden
Truth, at the very same time that they burrow into the /vertical/ to oppose
and topple it. Conniving against the sublimatory energy of Art, the body parts
constitute signiers that mark a yield to gravity, both because of the weight of
the physical elements they model, and the sense they promote of these pendulous forms already sliding down the surface of the body. In this capacity they
elaborate the eld of a desublimatory, horizontal axis that erodes the facade of
the vertical, bearing witness to the fact that behind that facade there lies not the
transparency of Truth, of meaning, but the opacity of the bodys matter, which
is to say, the formless.
It is as though Shermans own earlier work with the /horizontal/ has now
led her back to the vertical, sublimated image, but only to disbelieve it. Greeting
the vertical axis with total skepticism, the Old Master images work to discorroborate it, to deate it, to stand in the way of its interpellant eect.
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T V P
However, even this bedrockthe vomit and the blood for instancereturns to cultural signicance: that is, to the diculty of
the body, and above all the female body, while it is subjected to the
icons and narratives of fetishism.
Laura Mulvey50
Nothing, it would seem, could be less alike than Shermans impersonation
of various Raphaels and Davids and Ingres and the series she worked on over
roughly the same time period (198791), to which various descriptive rubrics
have been given, among them bulimia and vomit. And yet the notion of the
veil can operate for both series: either in the manner of a hermeneutics of the
work of art, as described above; or, for the bulimia pictures, in the manner of
what Mulvey has called the phantasmagoria of the female body.
Indeed, as has often been pointed out, the female body itself has been
made to serve as a metaphor for hermeneutics, which is to say as the Truth to
which one might penetrate upon lifting the veil of the work. But Mulveys
phantasmagoria recasts this Truth into its psychoanalytic dimension and shows
it as yet one more avatar of fetishism. For the truth that was sought behind the
veil, the truth for which the woman-as-fetish now functions as symptom, is the
truth of the wound inicted by a phantasmatic castration. Thus the interior of
the female body is projected as a kind of lining of bodily disgustof blood, of
excreta, of mucous membranes. If the woman-as-fetish/image is the cosmetic
facade erected against this wound, the imagined penetration of the facade produces a revulsion against the bodily uids and wastes that become condensed
with the wounded body in the iconography of misogyny. And women themselves, Mulvey points out, participate in this notion of exterior/interior, of veiled
and unveiled. Speaking of how women identify with misogynistic revulsion, not
only in adopting the cosmetics of the masquerade but in pathologically attempting to expunge the physical marks of the feminine, she says: The images
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of decaying food and vomit raise the specter of the anorexic girl, who tragically
acts out the fashion fetish of the female as an eviscerated, cosmetic and articial
construction designed to ward o the otherness hidden in the interior. 51
Now, the contrast between interior and exterior, which Mulvey had consumed as the mythic content of Shermans horizontals, continues to be the thematics she reads into Shermans work throughout its progression. Moving from
the horizontals to the parodically violent fashion images Sherman made in 1983,
Mulvey sees these as a protest against the smooth, glossy body of the fashion
model, a protest registered by a surface that seems to drop away to reveal a
monstrous otherness behind the cosmetic facade. Or, in the subsequent series
inspired by fairy tales she sees the revelation of the very stu of the unconscious
that lines the interior: While the earlier interiority suggested soft, erotic, reverie, these are materializations of anxiety and dread. Finally in the bodys disappearance into the spread of waste and detritus from the late eighties, the
topography of exterior/interior is exhausted, since these traces represent the
end of the road, the secret stu of bodily uids that the cosmetic is designed to
conceal. With the removal of this nal veil and the confrontation of the
woundthe disgust of sexual detritus, decaying food, vomit, slime, menstrual
blood, hairthe fetish fails and with it the very possibility of meaning: Cindy
Sherman traces the abyss or morass that overwhelms the defetishized body, deprived of the fetishs semiotic, reduced to being unspeakable and devoid of
signicance. 52
And yet, no sooner is it imagined that the vomit pictures have produced
the unspeakable, defetishized body than that body is reprogrammed as the
body of the woman: the mothers body from which the child must separate itself
in order to achieve autonomy, a separation founded on feelings of disgust against
the unclean and the undierentiated. Using Julia Kristevas term abjection for
this preverbal cut into the amorphous and the continuous in order to erect the
boundaries between an inside and an outside, a self and an other, Mulvey writes:
Barbara Creeds argument that abjection is central to the recurring
image of the monstrous feminine in horror movies is also applica-
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Jacques Derrida points to this peculiar slippage between the analytic metaphor of the veil removed to reveal the naked truth and the semantic content in
which the dreamer dreams of a veil that threatens to reveal his nakedness. He
turns to Freuds use of the story of The Emperors New Clothes in this connection. For Freud is illustrating his theory of unveiling the latent contents by
revealing that the hidden theme of the fairy tale is the dream of nakedness, which
is to say, the dream of veiling/unveiling. Objecting that The Emperors New
Clothes is not latently about the dream of nakedness, but manifestly so, and
into the bargain about the act of revelationstaged by the child who calls out,
But hes naked!that itself performs, within the text, the act of veiling/unveiling, Derrida writes:
Freuds text is staged when he explains to us that the text, e.g. that
of the fairy tale, is an Einkleidung [disguise] of the nakedness of the
dream of nakedness. What Freud states about secondary revision
(Freuds explaining text) is already staged and represented in advance
in the text explained (Andersens fairy tale). This text, too, described
the scene of analysis, the position of the analyst, the forms of his
language, the metaphorico-conceptual structures of what he seeks
and what he nds. The locus of one text is in the other.54
With this model of the way the form of the inquiry will produce the semantic version, or the thematization, of that very formveiling/unveilingas
its answer, in an act of nding that always nds itself, Derrida looks at Lacans use
of a story by Edgar Allan Poe to illustrate his own psychoanalytic theories of
the operations of the signier. Turning to Lacans Seminar on The Purloined
Letter, Derrida says: If the critique of a certain sort of semanticism constitutes
an indispensable phase in the elaboration of a theory of the text, the Seminar
exemplies a clear progress beyond any post-Freudian psychoanalytic critique.
It takes into account the organization, material as well as formal, of the signier
without throwing itself upon any semantic, not to say thematic, content of the
text. 55
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And yet Derrida will progress from this point toward a demonstration that
for Lacan, too, despite his insistence on the materiality of the signier and on its
condition as the mere marker or operator of dierencea dierential function
that cannot accept the assignment of a xed meaninghis interpretation of
Poes Purloined Letter will constantly move toward an unveiling that will nd
what it seeks in the place where it expects to nd it. It will nd, that is, that the
letterthe phallic signierconstructs the fetish: It is, woman, a place unveiled as that of the lack of the penis, as the truth of the phallus, i.e. of castration.
The truth of the purloined letter is the truth itself, its meaning is meaning, its
law is law, the contract of truth with itself in the logos. 56
If Lacan wants to show that in Poes story the incriminating letter, which
the Minister steals from the Queen only, once it is in his possession, to have it
ravished from him in turn by Dupin, is the phallussignier of the pact that
links Queen to King, and signier as well of castrationso that anyone who
possesses it is feminized, this letter-as-phallus, he insists is a signier, the circulating operator of meaning, cutting out each character in turn as he or she is
submitted to its course. But Derrida argues that far from being the mere dierential function of structural linguistics, this letter functions, in fact, as a transcendental signier, which is to say as the term in a series whose ideal and idealizing
privilege comes from the fact that it makes the series possible. For Lacan insists
not only that the letter-as-phallic-signier is indivisible and indestructible, but
that it has a certain and proper place, the two taken together producing the very
truth of the letter: that it will always arrive at its destination, namely, on or at the
body of the woman.
The slippage Derrida is interested in is thus a version of the same slippage
that had occurred in The Emperors New Clothes. For here the notion of
pure dierence continually returns to the same signied, and the signifying chain
with its endless play of signiers is in fact rooted in place. Thus the analyst is
trapped by the very lure of meaningfulnessits me!that he wishes to analyze. The ideality of the letter-as-phallic-signier derives from the interpellant
system, the one that produces meaning as points of stability between signiers
and signieds:
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The idealism which resides in [this system] is not a theoretical position of the analyst, it is a structure-eect of signication in general,
whatever transformations or adjustments are practiced on the space
of semiosis. It is understandable that Lacan nds this materiality
unique: he retains only its ideality. He considers the letter only at
the point where, determined (whatever he says about it) by its
meaning-content, by the ideality of the message which it vehiculates, . . . it can circulate, intact, from its place of detachment to the
place of its re-attachment, that is to say, to the same place. In fact,
this letter does not elude only partition, it eludes movement, it does
not change place.57
We have seen this before, this result of the structure-eect of signication
in general, which the analyst wants to reveal or unveil but which the analysis
itself repeats by continually setting up the fetishthe Truth of the veil/unveiledin the place of meaning. We have seen this in the analysis of Shermans
art through all types of mythic consumption, including that of the theory of the
male gaze as production of the eroticized fetish. In all of these there is the continual rush toward the signied, the refusal to follow the signiers, the steady consumption of the mythic production of meaning.
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of the horizontalized, urinary trace on the one hand and anti-form on the
other.
Now the same discursive horizon that is encircling Shermans work, demanding that it either acknowledge or disconrm its commitments to feminism,
has also held up for criticism, much of it virulent, the work of another artist
whose major support is the photographic image. This artist is Hans Bellmer, who
spent the years 193449, that is, from the rise of the Nazi Party through World
War II, in Germany making work to which he gave the series title La Poupee.
Photographs of dolls that he assembled out of dismountable parts, placing the
newly congured body fragments in various situations, mainly domestic, in an
early version of installation art, and then disassembling them to start anew, Bellmers work has been accused of endlessly staging scenes of rape and of violence
on the bodies of women.
It thus would seem, within the present discursive horizon, that the act of
choosing to make ones art by means of photographing suggestively positioned
dolls is, itself, a decision that speaks volumes. Sherman can continue to call these
works Untitled but they nevertheless produce their own reading through a connection to the Poupees of Bellmer.
And this is to say that among other things, they are a statement of what it
means to refuse to an artist the work that he or she has donewhich is always
work on the signierand to rush headlong for the signied, the content, the
constructed meaning, which one then proceeds to consume as myth. Bellmers
signiers areamong other thingsdoll parts. They are not real bodies and
they are not even whole bodies. And these signiers are operated in a way that
allows them to slide along the signifying chain, creating the kind of slippage that
is meant, precisely, to blur their meaning, rather than to reify it, or better, to
create meaning itself as blurred.
Nowhere is this more evident than in an image of four legs attached to a
swivel joint that radiate outward along a hay-strewn ground (see g., p. 27).
Unmistakably swastika-like in their conguration, these legs present the viewer
with a representation that constructs the Nazi emblem in relation to the scenario
of the part-object, in which the body is experienced as being threatened and
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invaded by dismembering objects. As has been pointed out by Hal Foster in his
reading of Bellmers project, the fascist subjects embrace of the perfect body of
the trained soldier and of a hardened neoclassicism has itself been read as a defense against its own sense of menace. That fear of invasionby a group of
others who threaten its borders both geographically ( Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Bolsheviks) and psychically (the unconscious, sexuality, the feminine)
has been seen in its turn as a projection of a fantasized bodily chaos, the result of a
ruined ego construction, a chaos against which the fascist subject armors himself,
seeking a defense by means of the human body. 61
Seeing Bellmers project as one that submits itself to sadomasochistic fantasies in order to explore the convulsive tension between binding and shattering
and thus to assume a complicity with the fascist subject only to expose it most
eectively, Foster writes: For in the poupees this fear of the destructive and the
defusive is made manifest and reexive, as is the attempt to overcome it in violence against the feminine otherthat is a scandal but also a lesson of the
dolls. 62
Bellmer, himself the son of a hated authoritarian father who was indeed a
Party member and against whom the Poupees can be seen to stage their most
agrant transgression, had written, If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is
because, for me, the world is a scandal. The failure to observe the conguration
of the swastika as the ground of reexiveness from which Bellmer can strike
against the fathers armor is a failure that allows the semantic naivete of a description of the works signied as: a victim of rape.
Just as I would like to think of Sherman in a dialogue with Crimp in the
production of Untitled Film Still #36, I imagine her reecting on Fosters argument in the course of producing Untitled #263. This is certainly not because I
picture her sitting around and reading works of criticism. It is rather because she
fully inhabits a discursive space vectored by, among other things, her friends. So
that many voices circulate within this space, the supports of many arguments and
theories, among them those of Hal Foster.
But the coherence of Shermans work, something that comes out in retrospect as each succeeding series seems to double back and comment on the earliest
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ones, will probably do as much as anything to interpret these images and resolve
these perhapses. Laura Mulvey comments on this eect of Shermans retrojective meaning: The visitor [of a Sherman retrospective exhibition] who reaches
the nal images and then returns, reversing the order, nds that with the hindsight of what was to come, the early images are transformed. 63
Thus even as this text is going to press, Sherman is undoubtedly making
new work. And in that series, or perhaps the next one, we will encounter signiers that will cut across the discursive horizon and the plane of the image to
reinforce and thus to clarify what is even now going on under the hood.
New York, 1993
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Recounting his role in the development of the teaching system at the Bauhaus,
Johannes Itten tells about setting a problem for an advanced group of students
by asking them to draw two lemons perched atop a bright green book. Puzzled
at the apparent simplemindedness of the exercise, the students whipped o their
drawings in a few minutes and sat back to wait. Ittens response was to approach
the still-life setup, take one of the lemons, cut it into slices, and pass it out to the
students to taste. Are you sure youve captured the reality of the lemon? he
asked. Smiling in comprehension, they then set back to work.1
Two aspects of this story are important in this context. First, there is the
existence of the problem set as the vehicle for teaching art throughout practically
the whole of this century. And then, there is that matter of the reality of the
lemon, what in Bauhaus language was called Sachlichkeit, or the world of
objectivity. This objectivity was understood to mean the real properties of objects or materialsthe hardness, the shininess, the coldness of metal, the roundness and muteness of pebbles, the rhythm-within-variation of wood grainand
the laws of color and of form.
That these properties are both formal and objective, that they are what an
artist searches for beneath the happenstance of appearance, that there are equally
objective rules of compositional harmonics or of contrast, that there is in short
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a formal language that can be both learned and spoken, this is the pedagogical
legacy of modernism. It is a kind of training that staves o subjectivity as long as
possible, that dreads a too-early fall into the purely personal.
Among the ve hundred or so photographs that comprise the oeuvre of
Francesca Woodman are many that remain in their original presentation format
for reviews in her classes at RISD. Still mounted in their cardboard mats, they
often bear the titles of those problem sets that are intended to introduce the rules
of the most basic stock-in-trade of the photographer. We nd Depth of Field
penciled below the bottom left corner of some of them; Point of View, or
Three Kinds of Melons in Four Kinds of Light, or Charlie the Model, or
On Being an Angel announce what sounds like the problem sets of other
assignments. In certain cases the original problem and its relation to the skills a
photographer must develop are obvious; in other cases we must infer, although
without too much diculty, what the point of the exercise might have been.2
The tenfold series called Charlie the Model is structured as if it were imagined
as the response to a portrait assignment: something like Photograph someone
you know in a way that will bring out his or her customary actions and gestures.
The much smaller group, titled On Being an Angel, could have been a way of
answering the problem Is it possible to photograph something that doesnt exist? Or the series called Space2, which was undoubtedly made in fulllment
of a studio assignment, might have been devised as a reply to something like
Dene a particular space by emphasizing its character, its geometries, for
example.
Woodmans response to this last problem is characteristic of the way she
worked, not only as a student, but later as a photographer after she left RISD.
She internalized the problem, subjectivized it, rendered it as personal as possible.
Her Space Squared became a glass and wood display case found in the
storerooms of the museum, with a naked body crouched inside it pressing against
one of its panes, in a gesture of mute imprisonment. Or again, that same case,
now more centered within the frame of the image, captures the crouching body
blurred in a haze of light, another body draped across the top of the case as a
kind of pedimental gure emphasizing the architecture of this peculiar cage of
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glass. Or, in a third way of imagining the subject: a display case lled with stued
animals divides the frame of the photograph into the geometrical packages of its
sections and their shelves. The upper-left quadrant shows us gulls, the right one
a fox, the lower left a raccoon, the lower-right a disturbance, as the rectilinear
pane of the cases door rotates slightly out of alignment with the face of the
image, mirroring unexplainable reaches of the room in front of it, pushed open
by the pressure of the head of a girlWoodman herselfspilling out of the
vitrine, her hair tumbling onto the oor of the room.
One of the sensations one has in looking at these examples is amazement at
the dispatch with which the formal, objective, part of the problem is dispensed
witha dispatch that is also a kind of giddy brilliance. The geometry of the
three-dimensional world must be made to acknowledge the two-dimensional
parameters of the print, must be reconciled to the atness of the photographers
optical ground. The pressure of those bodies, turning all architectural edges into
surrogate frames that contain, atten, delimit; that use of glass to refer to the
supposed transparency to reality of the photographic medium even while devising means to render it opaque; that constant reference to the inner laws of the
photograph as it stills motion and holds its contents in eternal display: all these
things are acknowledgments of the formal constraints that square a space,
aligning it ever more tightly with the conditions of the Rolexs elditself a
square.
But those are merely the objective dimensions of the problem as Woodman chose here to read it. The real conceptual pressure of the problem starts
somewhere else . . . with the meaning of a cage for the body it holds. That is
space really squared, no? What does it feel to be on display? What does forever
feel like? What would it be like to be, eternally, the center of someones gaze?
One can almost hear the inner laughter that must have greeted the unspoken decorum of the pedagogical task. Objectivity is ne; but without the subjective, the personal, there simply is no problem.
Charlie the Model brings home the way the objective language is both
never out of sight and never quite the point. The rst print in the series bears
the inscription Charlie has been a model at RISD for 19 years. I guess he knows
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a lot about being attened to t paper. The image so captioned shows the corner
of a classroom where a man in pants and a T-shirt, holding a pane of glass in
front of him, bends to regard his own image framed in a large wall-mirror. In
the second image Charlie has shed his clothes and, framed between the mirror
of one of the rooms walls and a window dening the plane of the other, he
holds a large sketch page before him on which we see the eorts of one of the
painting students to render Charlies familiar girth, his genial nudity. Charlie
himself lifts a leg in mock imitation of the pose. Holding a long sheet of paper
in front of him in the third image, he whips it to one side in the fourth, where
it appears as a phantom haze not quite registered by the just-too-slow exposure,
a blur of light misaligned with the frame of the window. The caption says,
There is the paper and then there is the person.
But since the person always seemed, within the work of art, to entail
risk, that is not a danger to which Woodman seemed to be able to expose another. And so, seven images into the set we see Woodman herself, rst clothed,
instructing Charlie on the pose, surrounded by the props of the series: the pane
of glass, the hand-held mirror, the round shbowl; then, in the succeeding pair,
she too is naked, her own nudity something blurred and nervous, dancing
around Charlies stolid ability to hold the pose, to give himself to the paper.
For Woodman, this giving oneself to the paper was both the meaning of
the pose and the conditions of the objective language of the mediumconditions that are serious, even grim, if really considered, if taken quite literally. Everything that one photographs is in fact attened to t paper, and thus under,
within, permeating, every paper support, there is a body. And this body may be
in extremus, may be in pain. The last entry in the Charlie the Model series
refers to death. We see Charlie spread-eagled in the darkened corner, the pane
of glass pressing against his chest. It is not visually a very pleasant image; there is
too much shadow for it to read. But the caption goes, Sometimes things seem
very dark. Charlie had a heart attack. I hope things get better for him.
The pair of prints Horizontale and Verticalemade at RISDdemonstrate once again the subjectication of the objective language, the immediate
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instinct to register the formal within the support of the body. In the problemset mentality you are asked to create a formal pair, like depth/surface, gure/
frame/, horizontal/vertical. What would you think of? As a photographer, what
would you start to do? Woodman thought about the bodys assumption of those
dimensionsnot so much as a eld of action: stretching, leaping, oating, lying
downbut as a eld of inscription. In one print we see a kneeling gure whose
lower torso nearly lls the frame. She is clothed in black, striped tights, their
striations running vertically along the length of the legs and thighs toward her
waist. Hanging by her side, one arm holds the verticality of the pose, the other
shakes itself into a blur of horizontal motion.
In the mate to this image, the gure is seated on a low stool, and once
more we only see her from about waist down. But now her legs, stretched before
her, are tightly wrapped in bands of plastic that circle her esh every several
inches, alternating ligatures and indecent bulges. Yet because this apparition extends from the upper-left corner of the frame to its lower-right, the direction of
these bindings is complicated by a diagonal condition, just as the moving hand
in the rst print had counteracted the too pat verticality of the stripes.
Always to insert her own body onto the eld of the problem, to use it,
understand it, as the ground of whatever sense the image might make, is the
pattern that emerges throughout the problem sets that Woodman undertook.
House is another series, whether assignment or not we will not know. Perhaps
at some point the students were asked to picture something familiar, their own
rooms, for example. The response of House is to take a dilapidated space, a
house within which the paint is aking, the wallpaper peeling o in long pastestiened strips, the oorboards warped and the plaster falling. But these things
are not really the objects of vision. They are not what is examined. They are
what is used as surrogate surfaces, the elements that atten someone to t paper. For everywhere in the eld we make out the gure of Woodman: crouched
behind the framelike facade of a mantel, hidden by a great curl of wallpaper,
vanishing into the attening haze of a window embrasure. Just out of sight, she
is the eld of experience, tiny, fragile, slid just beneath the skin.
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of the desiring machines, to reinvent the Duchamp eect within the world of
schizo-capitalism.2 The total interconnectedness of the machines and the absolute deterritorialization of the world onto which they cling: an undierentiated
socius, the body without organs, the subject without a center, the world without Oedipus.
The bachelor machine of Anti-Oedipus constructs the relationship between the desiring machines and the body without organs, between the bachelors world of production and the brides domain of inscription. The desiring
machines produce by intercepting the continuous ows of milk, urine, semen,
shit; they interrupt one ow in order to produce another, which the next machine will interrupt to produce a ow for the next, and so on. Each machine is
a part-object: the breast-machine, the mouth-machine, the stomach-machine,
the intestine-machine, the anus-machine. As opposed to this the body without
organs produces nothing; it re-produces. It is the domain of simulation, of series
crossing one another, of the possible occupation of every place in the series by a
subject forever decentered. I am Prado, I am also Prados father. I venture to
say that I am also Lesseps. . . . I wanted to give my Parisians, whom I love, a new
ideathat of a decent criminal. I am also Chambigealso a decent criminal. . . . The unpleasant thing, and one that nags at my modesty, is that at root
every name in history is I. 3 The body without organs is the place of inscription; it
is textual, semiological. But its logic is not that of the signier, that of representation. Rather it is the logic of ows of information in which the content of the
rst ow (its product) is the expressive medium of the second (its producer).
Deleuze and Gauttari quote McLuhan here: The electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message, as it were, unless it is used to spell out
some verbal ad or name. This fact, characteristic of all media, means that the
content of any medium is always another medium. The content of writing is
speech, just as the written word is the content of print, and print is the content
of the telegraph. 4 The same logic is at work, then, within the world of productionthe desiring machinesand that of consumption and re-production
the body without organs. That is the achievement of the bachelor machine; it
holds up the mirror in which the blossoming of the bride reects onto the
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cemetery of the uniforms and liveries, in which the inscription is the same as the
production, a place where the erotic energy of the shots is locked forever in a
mirrorical return. The bachelor machine produces this folding of the one over
the other as a moment of pure intensity.
In 1989 the bachelor machine was there, waiting, to provide Sherrie Levine with a way to make sculpture. The Duchamp eect she needed was not
that of the ready-made, which describes the relations among commodities, and
between commodities and their consumers, but that of the bachelor-machine,
which invokes the connections between part-objects. And the malic molds, otherwise called the cemetery of uniforms and liveries, would provide these partobjects ready-made. The way to make a sculpture would be to exhume
them, to liberate them from the plane of The Large Glass, to cast them in three
dimensions. By freeing them from their connection in the series: sieves-malic
molds-capillary tubes-glider-chocolate grinder. . . , they would be liberated
ever more securely into the other series: Rodin-Maillol-Brancusi-DuchampHesse. . . , the series that includes David Smith most clearly when he dreams of
wanting to make a train.
And nothing needs to be added to these bachelors. They are just as Duchamp left them, ready-made. Not as he made them, for on the eld of The
Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even they are in the two dimensions of sheets
of lead; but as he projected them, within the notes he so patiently stored in The
Green Box. For he envisioned them as molds after all, and therefore to be cast.
Each cast producing a bachelor, or as he would also put it, a malic form. And
the contents of the molds he described as well, when he imagined the illuminating gas inside the molds as solidifying into frosty spanglesa thousand spangles
of frosty gas. To cast the bachelors in glass, and then to frost the glass, is therefore
to add nothing, to create nothing. It is to accept Duchamps bachelors, his malic
forms, ready-made. It is to do nothing more than to occupy that historical position that can be called the Duchamp eect.
The only thing here that is added to the Duchamp eect is what is subtracted, namely, the eect of cutting away the bachelors from the rest of the
apparatus, from the glider, the sieves, the grinder, the scissors, the splashes. . . ,
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and nally of separating each bachelor from his fellows. The isolation is what is
added. It is, we could say, an added subtraction. So that the question is how to
characterize this excision that the artists own desiring machine produces within
the connected ow of Duchamps apparatus, of Duchamps glass?
One answer is that the added subtraction equals lack. Desire, according
to this, desires what is absent. It wants to have the missing thing. And that thing
that is missing will, by giving lack its name, also give desire its meaning. In this
reading the sculpture occupies the level of a fantasy. It stays within the world
of representation as the model of something desired. Its lack is castrative; its
meaning is redemptive, meaning redeemed. It is sculpture as the desire for
meaning.
But another answer is that the added subtraction allows the bachelor, now
cast in glass, actually to be produced, and thus to be added to the domain of
reality. The bachelor does not mark the place of lack but rather the site of production. And within this production it forms a series, for it is produced in multiple. It creates a ow of little glass replicas, the continuum of the series that the
machine now slices apart, making one little thing after the other. And, actualized
within this production, it enters the whole array of other, similar, series:
1. The art-historical series: lying recumbent, like the gleaming bronze
eggs of Brancusi, it attaches itself to them, as so many infantile moments of contentment, so many breasts, mouths, bellies.
2. The aesthetic series: sheltering within its little, glass vitrine, it is like
the fragments of antiquity displayed in a museumso many torsos, legs, arms,
shoulders. Which means its glass case becomes a museum-machine, interrupting
the ow of the antique Kunstindustriethe fth-, fourth-, third-century circulation of multiples within the classical decorative-arts productionisolating and
creating the neoclassical fragment, the aestheticized form of modernist sculpture
as a desire for the part-object.
3. The formal series: a series within a series, it is the glass container inside
the glass container of its case, reproducing itself in ever smaller miniaturizations,
glass as the form of transparency, as form en abme.
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Untitled (The Bachelors: Cuirassier), 1989. Glass, 12 1/2 x 5 1/2 x 3 1/4 inches.
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Untitled (The Bachelors: Gardien de la paix), 1989. Glass, 10 1/2 x 11 x 4 1/2 inches.
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Untitled (The Bachelors: Livreur de grand magasin), 1989. Glass, 10 x 2 1/2 x 2 1/2 inches.
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External Simulation View at Night, 1994. Metro Pictures Gallery, New York.
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That style takes the condition of spectacle as a fact of life. Writing in the 1930s,
Walter Benjamin had imagined the revolutionary eectwhether for good or
evilof photographic reproduction on the work of art, the destruction of its
aura, both in terms of its condition as unique, and its embeddedness in a tradition of rich associations, by delivering the aesthetic image to the system of its
own replication and dissemination: what would later come to be called sign
exchange. But however vivid his imagination, Benjamin could not know what
it would be like for these eects to have become the totality of ones experience.
He could not know the degree to which the oppositions that run through his
own work, structuring its logicoppositions such as those between the storyteller and the journalist, or the collector and the consumerwould collapse
under the simulacral force of spectacle.
What Lawler takes for granted is the result of this force and its absolute
pervasiveness. It is no longer the case that painting has a resistant opacitydue
to its material presence, its objectiable surfacewhile photography is nothing
but the pure transparency of a slippery illusionism through which we are sucked
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into the half-truths of the world of media. Under the pressures of spectacle, the
logic of this opposition has become warped into something that looks more like
a pretzel or a Mobius strip than it does a straightforward binary. For, within the
conditions of a culture of the spectacle, the values of opacity and transparency
have, it would seem, changed places. As Andy Warhol had already made perfectly clear, media has constructed its own supposedly transparent world as a
space entirely peopled by commodities (the Marilyns, the Jackies, the Elvises),
so that the signs that circulate within it are as opaque and depthless as one could
want. And on the other hand, the conditions of reproduction, as they seep across
the boundary into high art, a boundary they have rendered altogether porous,
have turned every gesture and every seemingly resistant surface of painting into
the glitteringly transparent sign of its own subordination to a spectacle world in
which it no longer operates in relation to values like spontaneity or authenticity,
but functions as a pure token of sign exchange.
And there is another transformation that has become a corollary of this: if
the opacity of the modernist pictorial surface was an index of the materiality of
the picture plane, it acted to force that plane onto a level continuous with other
physical bodies thereby declaring the work of art a function of public space. The
displacement of that index into the world of reproductionswhere the gesture
is always already an image of itselfis a function of the solipsism of media, of a
condition of spectacle that means that its public is impossibly dispersed and privatized, each viewer isolated in front of a television set, each positioned at the
aperture of the peep show. This too is the work of what we could call the photographic as it operates on all the arts.
To assume this condition of spectacle as the very texture of ones own
world, the fabric of ones very sensibility, is to observe that world through the
eyes of spectacle. It is to see everything mutate into at least two versions of itself:
the original object and the sign for that object, although within the logic of
spectacles mirror reections it is never clear which is which. The gleams and
reections that interest Lawler, as she photographs works of modernist art within
their present condition of commodicationa Frank Stella protractor painting, for example, photographed as nothing but its own rainbowlike reection in
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the polished oor of its display spaceare avatars of this pervasive condition of
the sign.
But it is not only recent art that is so infected. As Lawler photographs the
salon of a Swiss collector, its decorous little tables and chairs seem to have migrated from the world of rareed antiques and to have entered the space of the
reproduction, the elegant room now resembling nothing so much as an upperclass hotel lobby. But even more disconcertingly, the two paintings by Ferdinand
Hodler that dominate the salon undergo the same internal mutation. For Hodler
has pictured three pairs of lovers, two in one painting, one in the other, their
bodies locked together in turn-of-the-century symbolist erotic intensity. Each
of the pairings is slightly dierent, an index of the measure to which lovers are
unique in each others eyes, revered with feelings that are never-to-beduplicated, or repeated. Looking at this display through Lawlers gazeso attentive and yet so dispassionatewhat we see is not the uniqueness of these pairs
but their repetition, each becoming the redoubled sign of the other, as though
despite whatever he had intended, Holder had attened and debased and emptied out his own world.
III
It is the photograph of the Hodler salon that stands sentinel over Lawlers
subsequent displays of the paperweights (one of which contains the Hodler
salon in miniature) as a series. Using as their vehicle, the kitsch-level, masscultural object, these works enact their relation to photography not only in their
obvious condition as multiples, but more interestingly in the way each crystal
half-sphere presents itself as a lens, one through which one peers as though
through a cameras viewnder. And by means of that line of sight, that unifocal
vector, one is summoned to perform on this side of the lens the very closing out
of public space that has emerged as the result of the mediated world of photography. Substituting for the shared space within which culture formerly operated,
a position that can only be occupied by one viewer at a time, the lens enforces
a situation in which the only public thing that can occur in the space in which
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Untitled (Salon Hodler), 1992. Cibachrone, crystal, and felt, 2 x 3 1/2 inches.
Write a story, do, about a young man, the son of a serf, a former grocery boy, a
choirsinger, a high school pupil and university student, brought up to respect rank,
to kiss the hands of priests, to truckle to the ideas of othersa young man who expressed thanks for every piece of bread, who was whipped many times, who went
without galoshes to do his tutoring, who used his sts, tortured animals, was fond of
dining with rich relatives, was a hypocrite in his dealing with God and men, needlessly, solely out of a realization of his own insignicancewrite how this young
man squeezes the slave out of himself, drop by drop, and how, on awaking one ne
morning, he feels that the blood coursing through his veins is no longer that of a
slave but that of a real human being.
Anton Chekhov in a letter to a young writer
C 8
these works are displayed is a form of voyeurism in which one either watches
someone else looking or takes ones own visual pleasure with the concomitant
sensation of being watched.
And on the other side of the lens, the one that gathers a world of objects
into its view, what we encounter is a kind of brilliant summary of the lessons
Walter Benjamin read to us in his various essays on photographylessons about
photographys bringing far away things close to us, miniaturizing them for us so
as to give us a sense of possessing them. Lessons as well about how photography
would utterly transform art, forcing it to renounce its earlier cult-value and even
its subsequent exhibition-value for a new, modern, post-photographical value,
which he linked to documentary. Benjamin had high hopes, of course, for the
revolutionary potential of this documentary, hopes that Lawler does not allow
herself, here, to share. But the documentation she nonetheless brings us is about
the fate of art in the private spaces of its commodication as it is also about the
fate of the museum. For the little half-orb of the paperweight produces its own
counterdiscourse about the museums stated ambitions to assemble disparate objects into a single space and to bestow on them the intellectual, aesthetic, and
categorical coherence of a collection, conserving these objects for posterity, one
symbol for which is the obsessive placing of them under glass.
Yet even while it announces the shriveling and diminution of these aspirations within the trivialization of the spectacle world, this symbol also reminds us
of the utopian aspects of the museums early project insofar as the museum presented an original that in its material presence seemed to oppose itself, all the
way down the line, to the simulacral drive of photography. And, indeed, what
one could call the utopian dimension of Lawlers paperweight objects is that they
are never completely or satisfactorily open to their own photographic reproduction: the lens producing, here, its own form of opacity and thus of resistance.
Thus it is somewhere in the thickness of the works orbs of crystalpart photographic lens, part vitrine, part protective glazingthat these two fatesarts and
photographyshave met and become intertwined. And strangely, photography
seems now to have taken up the cause of arts presumed uniqueness, its supposed
resistance to commodication both at the level of the object and at the level
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Untitled (Collection of 60 Drawings), 1992/93. Cibachrone, crystal, and felt, 2 x 3 1/2 inches.
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of its conditions of viewing. Which is to say that this paradoxical form of the
photographitself never completely reproducibleseems to have taken up the
cause of uniqueness and at the same time to be showing it to us from an extraordinary distance, bodying forth what might be seen as the sensuous equivalent of
what we could call the past.
IV
When Walter Benjamin writes about the collector, setting this gure against the
consumeras an endangered species to be contrasted with a wildly multiplying
weedthis opposition turns around a shared spatial metaphor, that of the case or
vitrine or protective covering itself set within a private interior. For commodity
culture has provided the consumer with objects that come in ever proliferating
casingsthe cozies, the bell jars, the upholstery guardsthat house the various bibelots and specialty items so necessary to the bourgeois home. Spinning
around itself its own version of that housing in miniature, the commodity
thereby takes on a human character, becoming a little microcosm of that subjectivity-set-within-an-interior which is itself proposed as the model of the
bourgeois subjects autonomy, its independence from the instrumentalized world
of public space. Yet the same delusive notion of subjectivity that operates for
the commodity operates for its owner, since as Benjamin argues, the bourgeois
apartment is not in fact the image of the renters freedom but instead of his powerlessness, of the fact that he no longer owns the means of production.
The sense in which the collector opposes this structure is that, for Benjamin, his acquisition of objects is precisely a means of giving them their liberty,
of removing them both from the condition of use and the structure of exchange
by imbedding them into a matrix of memory. One has only to watch a collector
handle the objects in his glass case, Benjamin writes. As he holds them in his
hands, he seems to be seeing through them into their distant past as though
inspired. So much for the magical side of the collectorhis old-age image, I
might call it; or again, to a book collector the true freedom of all books is
somewhere on his shelves (Unpacking My Library).
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But even as the true collector performs this ritual of liberating the objects
in his collection, the consumer debases that gesture by giving it its commodity
form, since the consumers collecting consists in nothing more than packaged
memories in the form of souvenirs. Souvenirs that come in many guises, one
persistent one being the image/object crystallized within the glass dome of the
paperweight.
That these objects of Lawlers should be complicitous with the commodied form of memory is continuous with the orbit of spectacle culture within
which she locates her works. But it is here that the peculiar aect of her style
its quiet lack of outrage, its absence of the judgmentalproduces that same
utopian moment, however brief, that registers in the crystalline lenss polyvalence as well. For the experience of stunned immobility she produces, while
it might be shared by the subject of spectacle, is also characteristic of a quite
dierent subject, one whom Walter Benjamin had in mind when he celebrated
the collector as a vanishing breed. Because in speaking about the glass cases in
which his rareed objects are stored, it is not the art amateur that Benjamin is
picturing so much as it is a gure who ultimately joins hands with a far older
form of collector, reaching back to the beginnings of collecting in the sixteenth
centurys addiction to the Wunderkammer. This is the ultimate model for Benjamin: those cabinets in which were stored strange assortments of natural and other
wonders, which Francis Bacon described as whatsoever the hand of man by
exquisite art or engine has made rare in stu, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance and the shue of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has
wrought in things that want life and may be kept. Typical of such a collection
would the following items from Sir Walter Copes cabinet: a Madonna made of
feathers, a chain made of monkey teeth, stone shears, the horn and tail of a
rhinoceros, the horn of a bull seal, a round horn that had grown on an Englishwomans forehead, a phosphorescent bird, etc.
This list makes it clear that the prize of these objects has nothing to do
with the intrinsic preciousness of their supports nor with any form of value deriving from a system that could be thought to be aesthetic. Rather, as the name
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implies, it is the sensation of wonder elicited by these objects that is what unites
them in their otherwise unfathomable heterogeneity, a sensation that Stephen
Greenblatt in Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World connects to the
sudden inux of strange objects brought back to Europe from the Americas.
Columbuss voyage initiated a century of intense wonder, he writes, adding:
European culture experienced something like the startle reex one can observe in infants: eyes widened, arms outstretched, breathing stilled, the whole
body momentarily convulsed. Implicit in this assimilation of the startle reex
to wonder is the sense that these marvels themselves belonged by denition to
no tradition, and thus imposed themselves on the consciousness of Europe as
objects deprived of aura.
The easiest reaction one can have to the disparate assortments Lawler documents as she tracks works of art back to their present spaces of private consumption, where they join the sleek jumble of domestic or commercial
furnishings as so much expensive decor, is that of contempt for the collectors
who now subject this art to a set of debased functions. But another reaction,
Lawler also teaches us, is possible as well. It is far less judgmental and in so being
opens the image up to that stunned immobility that can be associated with
wonder.
Consider the image, entirely typical of Lawlers work, that puts the collectors power of composing on display as it frames a section of a room in such a
way as to underscore the arrangement of rectangles formed by paintings ( Joseph
Beuys, a Japanese screen) and furniture (chair back, side table) hung on or set
against the background of a geometrically wood-paneled wall, the objects themselves truncated, Manet-style, by the framing edge of the photograph. However,
going beyond the mere sense that such a composition is a patchwork constituted
by disparate objects (paintings and furniture) is the presence, on the side table,
of a large petried fungus polished and inlaid with bronze ornaments and a lamp
fabricated from an African bronze utensil, its handle wreathed in cowry shells.
It is this identication that ranges itself on the side of wonder, thereby opening
the collection backward toward the fragility and precariousness of a cultural past,
203
C 8
It Could Be Elvis, 1994/96. Black and white photograph with text on mat, 28 x 30 inches.
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one that had from its very inception threaded the pillage of the new world together with the transxed opening up to the fresh domains of human consciousness which that bounty also induced.
If Lawlers camera documents the contemporary collectors powers to
compose, a power that implies everywhere a force of subjugation, it alsoin
the very stillness and distance of its gazeputs wonder in place. No matter how
temporarily and with what ambivalence.
New York, 1996
205
C 1: C C D M: B W I
1. I developed this initially in a discussion of surrealist objects and their relation to David
Smiths concept of totemism, in Terminal Iron Works: The Sculpture of David Smith (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 1971), 125.
2. Xavie`re Gauthier, Surrealisme et sexualite (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).
3. See, for example, Susan Rubin Suleiman, Transgression and the Avant-Garde: Batailles
Histoire de loeil, Subversive Intent (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990); Mary Anne
Caws, Rudolf Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, eds., Surrealism and Women (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1990); and Gloria Orenstein, Nadja Revisited: A Feminist Approach, Dada/Surrealism
8 (1978): 91106.
Part of the accusation of misogyny is that the powerful, male gures of the movement
suppressed participation by women (for example, Susan Suleimans A Double Margin, in
Subversive Intent). The feminist response to this has spawned a literature devoted to recovering
and celebrating the work of women surrealists. See La Femme Surrealiste, the special issue of
Obliques 1415 (1977); Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London:
Thames and Hudson, 1985); and Caws, Kuenzli, and Raaberg, Surrealism and Women.
4. See my Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking Press, 1977), 110120.
5. Denis Hollier, Surrealist Precipitates, October 69 (Summer 1994): 129.
6. Ibid.
7. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 115.
8. Ibid., 13; Suleiman is quoting Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Congurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 3334.
9. Rosalind Krauss, Corpus Delicti, October 33 (Summer 1985): 53.
10. Ibid., 7172.
11. Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 116. Representative of the attacks on me is Rudolf Kuenzlis
Surrealism and Misogyny, in Caws, Kuenzli, and Raaberg, Surrealism and Women, 2125.
12. Ibid., 16.
13. Ibid., 26.
14. Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 27.
15. Hal Foster, Armour Fou, October 56 (Spring 1991): 96.
16. See Honor Lasalle and Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Surrealist Confession: Claude Cahuns
Photomontages, Afterimage (March 1992): 1013; Laurie J. Monahan, Radical Transformations: Claude Cahun and the Masquerade of Womanliness, in Catherine de Zegher, ed., Inside
the Visible (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996): 125133.
17. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Viking
Press, 1971), 64.
208
209
C 3: A M: T /C/
1. Lawrence Alloway, in Agnes Martin, exhibition catalog (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1973), reprinted as Formlessness Breaking Down
Form: The Paintings of Agnes Martin, Studio International 85 (February 1973): 62.
2. Ibid. Martins text is published in Dieter Schwarz, ed., Agnes Martin: Writings/Schriften (Winterthur: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, 1992), 15.
3. Carter Ratcli, Agnes Martin and the Articial Innite, Art News 72 (May 1973): 26
27. For other discussions of Martins work in relation to the abstract sublime, see Thomas
McEvilley, Grey Geese Descending: The Art of Agnes Martin, Artforum 25 (Summer 1987):
9499; for her general placement within the category, see Jean-Francois Lyotard, Presenting
the Unpresentable: The Sublime, Artforum 20 (April 1982), and The Sublime and the AvantGarde, Artforum 22 (April 1984).
4. Robert Rosenblums The Abstract Sublime (Art News 59 [February 1961]: 5658), in
which such comparisons are made for Pollock and Rothko, laid the foundation for later discussions in this vein.
5. In Schwarz, Agnes Martin, 15.
6. Ibid., 37.
7. Kasha Linville, Agnes Martin: An Appreciation, Artforum 9 ( June 1971): 72.
8. Ibid., 73.
9. In the formal notation of semiological analysis, the placement of a word between slashes
indicates that it is being considered in its function as signierin terms, that is, of its condition
within a dierential, oppositional systemand thus bracketed o from its content or
signied.
10. Hubert Damisch, Theorie du /nuage/ (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1972).
210
211
intentions are hiddenif they were hidden, they could not be ecaciousbut because they
are naturalized (Mythologies, 131).
7. Another similar seriesnot sequential in a narrative sense but simply grouped around the
same costumeis comprised of stills #1720.
8. Judith Williamson, Images of Woman, Screen 24 (November 1983): 102; she quotes
Jean-Louis Baudry, The Mask, Afterimage 5 (Spring 1974): 27.
9. Lisa Phillips, Cindy Sherman (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1987): 14.
10. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974): What
gives the illusion that the sum is supplemented by a precious remainder (something like individuality, in that, qualitative and ineable, it may escape the vulgar bookkeeping of compositional
characters) is the Proper Name, the dierence completed by what is proper to it. The proper
name enables the person to exist outside the semes, whose sum nonetheless constitutes it entirely (191).
11. Phillips, Cindy Sherman, 8.
12. Arthur Danto, Untitled Film Stills: Cindy Sherman (New York: Rizzoli, 1990), 14.
13. Laura Mulvey, A Phantasmagoria of the Female Body: The Work of Cindy Sherman,
New Left Review 188 ( July/August 1991): 137.
14. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, Suitable for Framing: The Critical Recasting of Cindy Sherman, Parkett 29 (1991): 112.
15. Danto, Untitled Film Stills, 14.
16. Solomon-Godeau, Suitable for Framing, 115.
17. Mulvey, Phantasmagoria of the Female Body, 139.
212
18. Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 13 (Autumn 1975): 618;
republished in Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: University of Indiana
Press, 1989): 15.
19. The sequence of texts in which Freud develops this scenario begins with Infantile Genital
Organization of the Libido (1923), The Passing of the Oedipus-Complex (1924), and Female Sexuality (1931). In the 1925 essay, Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Dierences between the Sexes, the scenario takes a dierent form; it stresses the sense in
which meaning does not arise in the presence of the visual eld but is only retrojected on it as
a result of a verbal prohibition: When a little boy rst catches sight of a girls genital region,
he begins by showing irresolution and lack of interest; he sees nothing or disowns what he has
seen . . . It is not until later, when some threat of castration has obtained a hold upon him, that
the obervation becomes important to him: if he then recollects or repeats it, it arouses a terrible
storm of emotion in him and forces him to believe in the reality of the threat.
20. In their introductory essays, Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose present the development
from the scenic event described by Freud to its subsequent semiological elaboration by Lacan.
See Mitchell and Rose, eds., Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne (New
York: Norton, 1982).
21. Mulvey, Visual Pleasure, 14.
22. Stephen Heath, Dierence, Screen 19 (Autumn 1978): 89.
23. Mulvey, Phantasmagoria, 141.
24. Pictures was the title of an exhibition organized in the fall of 1977 by Douglas Crimp for
Artists Space, New York, which focused on work structured around the issue of replication,
work that thereby could bring notions of representation into question. The ve artists included
Troy Brauntuch, Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Robert Longho, and Philip Smith. Crimps
connection to these issues continued and led to an essay that enlarged the circle of pictures
artists to include Cindy Sherman. See Douglas Crimp, Pictures, October 8 (Spring 1979):
7588.
213
25. Douglas Crimp, A Note on Degass Photographs, October 5 (Summer 1978): 99.
26. Godard puts this in the mouth of Fritz Lang, in the lm Contempt.
27. Ken Johnson, Cindy Sherman and the Anti-Self: An Interpretation of Her Imagery, Arts
(November 1987): 49.
28. Peter Schjeldahl, Shermanettes, Art in America (March 1982): 110.
29. Mulvey, Phantasmagoria, 142143.
30. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 290. Translation
modied.
31. Ibid., 285.
32. These Lacanian mathemes appear in Encore, Lacans 1972 seminar, and are published in
Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, 149. Here, the mathemes for the
female subject are also given: (there is no x that is not submitted to the phallus); and
(not all x are submitted to the phallus). As Stephen Melville points out, it is from this
matheme, which says the same thing as the mathemes for the male subject (there is an x that
is not submitted to the phallus), but does so indirectly, without the same existential insistence,
that Lacan derives the denition of the woman as not-all: pas-tout (see n. 33 below, p. 355).
33. Stephen Melville, Psychoanalysis and the Place of Jouissance, Critical Inquiry 13 (Winter
1987): 353.
34. Freuds discussions of mans assumption of an erect posture as the rst step toward culture
and as making possible a sublimated visuality are in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930),
Standard Edition 21: 99100; and Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Standard
Edition 7: 156157. The gestalt psychological interpretation of the upright posture is from
Erwin Straus, Born to See, Bound to Behold: Reections on the Function of Upright Posture
in the Aesthetic Attitude, in Stuart Spicker, ed., The Philosophy of the Body (New York: Quadrangle, 1970): 334359.
214
35. For the argument about Warhols and Morriss reading of the horizontality of Pollocks
mark, see my The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993); for the discussion of
Ruschas Liquid Words, see Yve-Alain Bois, Thermometers Should Last Forever, in Edward
Ruscha: Romance with Liquids (New York: Rizzoli, 1993). Both these readings are carried further in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A Users Guide (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1997).
36. The logic elaborated, for example, by Stephen Heath, slides from the phallus as signier
as thus a wholly dierential, nonpositive diacritical markto the phallus as form, which is to
say gestalt or image. Heath marks this by replacing references to the phallus with the composite
penis-phallus, all the while acknowledging the problems this gives rise to. See Heath,
Dierence, 55, 66, 83, 91.
37. Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New
York: Norton, 1978), 96.
38. Mulvey, Phantasmagoria, 143.
39. Victor Burgin, Photography, Fantasy, Function, in Thinking Photography (London: Macmillan, 1982), 189190.
40. In two instances of the publication of this work, dierent interpretations of its meaning
are registered by means of the dierent ways the image has been printed. In Cindy Sherman
(Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1987) the works darkness and obscurity is respected; whereas in
the Whitney Museums catalogue for Shermans retrospective, the image has been more highly
exposed to force its values upward and thus to reduce its uncanny eect.
41. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 94.
42. See Roger Caillois, Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia, October 31 (Winter 1984):
1732.
43. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 99.
215
216
217
C 7: S L: B
1. Michel Carrouges, Les machines celibataires (Paris: Arcanes, 1954).
2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and
Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
3. Nietzsche, letter to Jakob Burckhardt, 5 January 1889, as cited in Anti-Oedipus, 86.
4. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 23, as cited in
Anti-Oedipus, 241.
218
Albers, Annie, 89
Alloway, Lawrence, 77
Andersen, Hans Christian, 152
Brassa, 19
Brauner, Victor, 60, 62
Austen, Jane, 4
Bunuel, Luis, 7
Burgin, Victor, 133
Burke, Edmund, 77
Beckett, Samuel, 68
Bel Geddes, Barbara, 110
Cabanne, Pierre, 42
39, 156157
Benglis, Lynda, 51
35, 36, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 47,
49, 50
Carrington, Leonora, 17
Bewley, Marius, 66
Chadwick, Whitney, 29
Grossteste, Robert, 76
Dali, Salvador, 7, 11
Hugo, Valentine, 17
Irigaray, Luce, 73
Desnos, Robert, 47
Duchamp, Marcel, 42, 46, 47, 48, 50, 64,
Jensen, Al, 89
Johns, Jasper, 94
Judd, Donald, 94
Eluard, Paul, 11
Fini, Leonor, 17
Flavin, Dan, 94
Kuenzli, Rudolf, 29
Frampton, Hollis, 75
Freud, Sigmund, 130, 142, 151152
137140, 152153
Lawler, Louise, 191205, 192, 193, 197,
Gauthier, Xavie`re, 1
Leiris, Michel, 5, 47
LeWitt, Sol, 94
220
Ratcli, Carter, 77
Lippard, Lucy, 71
Rodin, Auguste, 54
Sage, Kay, 17
Maillol, Aristide, 1, 54
Samaras, Lucas, 96
Schreber, Judge, 63
Schwob, Lucy, 36
Masson, Andre, 62
Schwob, Marcel, 36
McCracken, John, 94
McLuhan, Marshall, 181
Mondrian, Piet, 88
Moore, 29, 44
Tabard, Maurice, 10
Tanning, Dorothea, 17
Tatlin, Vladimir, 65
Oldenburg, Claes, 96
Toyen, 60, 62
Turner, Lana, 78, 110
Parent, Mimi, 60
Picasso, Pablo, 177
Ubac, Raoul, 9, 13
Raaberg, Gwen, 29
Raphael, 143
Weston, Edward, 8
221
222