The Lure in the Dialectic of the Eye and the Gaze

Just a few images with a minimum of commentary on my part.



Left:Marcel Broodthaers, L'Oeil, 1966.

Right: Mary Cassatt, Woman in Black at the Opera 1879
Two thoughts from Lacan: "You never look at me from the place from which I see you."(103)
"I see from one point but...I am looked at from all sides."(72)
Top Right: Raphaelle Peale Venus Rising From the Sea A Deception 1822
A commentary on Zeuxis and Parrhasios. Trompe l'oeil or dompte-regard?

Top photo: Louise Bourgeois, "Destruction of the Father"

middle photo: Eva Hesse, "Ring Around"

bottom photo: Eva Hess, "Untitled not yet"

In, Objects Beyond Objecthood, Briony Fer uses a show put together by Lucy Lippard, titled, 'Eccentric Abstraction,' to move us from the 'dead-set Minimalism' and 'rigors of structural art' to the organic, erotic, sensous work of of Hesse and Bourgeois. 

Lippard saw Hesse's work as moving the object away from the literalness itself into a realm of excessive, bodily materiality. The show was held together by hanging work that used the vocabulary of body parts or bodily functions. It was Lippard's sense to place the body and the erotic, (abstractly not figuratively) at the center of contemporary art. 

But Fer find's it more interesting to ask, where is the subject to be placed?  He uses Bochner, who comments on Hesse's work that some of it is found as being empty. The viewer enters the physical embodiments but finds at this center a detachment of bodily empathies. Our subjectivity upon entering the work, gets lost. 

Fer turns to the critic, Kozloff, who talks about the soft-sculptures of Oldenburg who is being considered "anthropomorphic." Oldenburg transformed a fan into a giant, collapsing bodily form-suggestive of fatigue, inertia, deterioration...yet what if all this squirming stuff makes the spectator feel not more but less organic?"

In 1968, Lippard again shows work by a core group, including Hesse and Bourgeois and now, also, Oldenberg. So now we have a controversy over work being seen as organic, or as Fried interjects, "a theatrical encounter involving a monstrous body," and a superficial anthropomorphism that Hesse and Bourgeois were trying to distance themselves from.

On the one hand, Lippart's 'Eccentric Abstraction' was emphasizing the organic, the embodiment. On the other hand, there is an exaggeration of body parts, to the point of removing us from bodily empathy. 'The lost object-me.' There is a detachment. "Detachment is anything but neutral. Rather, it is the very presence of the object that heightens the sense of losing a portion of oneself." 

In a 1964 seminar, the psychoanalyst and theorist Jacques Lacan observed that the myth of the two painters reveals an interesting aspect of human cognition. While animals are attracted to superficial appearances, humans are enticed by the idea of that which is hidden. See reading What is A Picture? Lacan, J. pp.109.

Zeuxis and Parrhasius were painters who flourished during the 5th century BC. They are reported four hundred years later in the Naturalis Historia an encyclopedia written by Pliny the Elder, an ancient author and natural philosopher of some importance to have staged a contest to determine which of the two was the greater artist. When Zeuxis unveiled his painting of grapes, they appeared so luscious and inviting that birds flew down from the sky to peck at them. Zeuxis then asked Parrhasius to pull aside the curtain from his painting, only for Parrhasius to reveal the curtain itself was a painting, and Zeuxis was forced to concede defeat. Zeuxis is rumoured to have said: 'I have deceived the birds, but Parrhasius has deceived Zeuxis.' In other words, while his work had managed to fool the eyes of birds, Parrhasius' work had deceived the eyes of an artist.

 http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Zeuxis_and_Parrhasius

The Mirror Stage: I, I, I...

The Mirror Stage:

The primordial perception of the "I."  At around 6 months of age the child recognizes its own image in the mirror.  However, there is a disconnect between the child's sense of itself and the image of the uncoordinated, undeveloped image in the mirror; the fragmented body.

The imagos:

An unconscious, idealized mental image of someone, especially a parent, that influences a person's behavior.  The child in this undeveloped state identifies the parent (imagos) as the ideal human, causing feelings of uneasiness about their own place in the order of things.  Lacan says the relationship between the mirror stage and the imagos serves the function of establishing a relationship between the organism and its reality.

The Ego:

Lacan says it best, "This development is experienced as a temporal dialectic that decisively projects the formation of the individual into history.  The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation - and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of fantasies that extends from the fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopedic  - and, lastly, to the assumption of the armor of an alienating identity (the ego), which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development. 

 

 So really, it's not your parents' fault, its yours...