October 113

Art

Theory

Criticism

Politics

Tamar Garb and Mignon Nixon

A Conversation withJuliet Mitchell

Juliet Mitchell

Theory as an Object

Mignon Nixon

On the Couch

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

An Interview with ThomasHirschhorn

M6nica Amor

Another Geometry:Gego'sReticularea, 1969-1982

$13.00 / Summer 2005

Published by the MIT Press

OCTOBER

editors

Rosalind Krauss (Founding Editor) Annette Michelson (Founding Editor)

George Baker Yve-Alain Bois Benjamin H. D. Buchloh Leah Dickerman Hal Foster Denis Hollier Mignon Nixon Malcolm Turvey executive editor, OCTOBER books

Catherine de Zegher

managing editor

Lisa Pasquariello advisory board Emily Apter

Carol Armstrong Leo Bersani Jonathan Crary Thomas Crow Manthia Diawara EdwardDimendberg Andreas Huyssen Gertrud Koch Silvia Kolbowski Miwon Kwon

Stuart Liebman Molly Nesbit Allan Sekula Kaja Silverman Anthony Vidler

An electronic full text version of OCTOBERis available from MIT Press.

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Send advertisingand mailinglist inquiriesto the Marketing Dept., MITPressJournals(addressabove); (617) 253-2866; Fax: (617) 258-5028;E-mail:journals-info@mit.edu. ? 2005 by October Magazine,Ltd., and the Massachusetts Instituteof Technology.Statementsof fact and opinion appearingin OCTOBERare made on the responsibilityof the authorsalone, and do not imply the endorsement of the editors or the publisher. http://mitpress.mit.edu/october OCTOBER113, Summer 2005

113

Mignon Nixon

Introduction

3

Tamar Garb and Mignon Nixon

A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

9

Juliet Mitchell

Theory as an Object

27

Mignon Nixon

On the Couch

39

Benjamin H. D. Buchloh

An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn

77

Monica Amor

Another Geometry: Gego's Reticularea, 1969-1982

101

Back cover:ThomasHirschhorn.Extractfrom thepublication Les plantifs, les betes, les politiques (Geneva:Centregenevoisde gravurecontemporaine,1995). ? ThomasHirschhor 1995.

Photo:Nadia Rhabi. CourtesyGladstoneGallery,New York.

MONICA AMOR is Professor of Contemporary Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has written for various art publications including Art Nexus, ThirdText, Trans,and ArtJournal.In 2003 she was a fellow at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University. She is currently working on a book on Gego and the crisis of geometric abstraction in the Americas.

TAMARGARBis Professor of Art History at UniversityCollege London. She writes widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-centuryart and feminist Artistic theory. Her publications include Sistersof theBrush:Women's Culturein LateNineteenth-Century Paris (Yale, 1994), Bodiesof Modernity: France(Thames & Hudson, 1998), and Figureand Fleshin Fin-de-Siecle TheJew in theText:Modernityand theConstruction of Identity(with Linda Nochlin, Thames & Hudson, 1996). She is currently completing The PaintedFace:Portraitsof Womenin France1814-1914, due to be published by Yale in 2006-07.

JULIET MITCHELLis Professor of Psychoanalysisand Gender Studies in the Facultyof Social and Political Sciences, Universityof Cambridge, where she is also a Fellow ofJesus College. She is a full member of the Institute of Psychoanalysis,London, and of the International PsychoanalyticalSociety. Her most recent books are Siblings:Sexand Violence(Polity Press, 2003) and Mad Men and Medusas:Reclaiming Hysteriaand theEffectsof SiblingRelationson theHuman Condition and Feminism (Penguin/Basic Books, 2000). Her earlier Psychoanalysis (1974) was reprinted with a new introduction in 2000.

Please address all editorial correspondence to October,611 Broadway, #610, New York, NY 10012. We reserve the right to edit letters and responses selected for publication. We review manuscripts of no more than 8,500 words, doublespaced and submitted in duplicate.

Introduction

MIGNON NIXON

"Psychoanalytic theory, despite a new surge to the recurrent clarion call of its demise, has so far survived; survived not only those who hope it will not do so, but those who start by relating to it," writes Juliet Mitchell in this issue of October.

Clarifying the distinction between "using" and "relating to" theory, Mitchell turns to a 1968 paper delivered in New York by the British psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott. She refers to his rather unexpected emphasis on "the positive use of destructiveness"-a position taken, she contends, in tacit sympathy with the era's politically active youth and in open contradiction of the special emphasis on "relating to objects" in the psychoanalytic tradition with which Winnicott is closely associated, namely, object relations. "I propose to put forward for discussion the idea of the use of an object," wrote Winnicott. "The allied subject of relating to objects seems to me to have had our full attention."2 In this issue, we return to the question of how psychoanalysisis used in contemporary art, theory, and criticism. A common charge against criticism in particular is that it treats theory as doxa, or, in other words, does not dare to use it. The critic is claimed to be, as in Moustafa Safouan's description of the "docile" psychoanalysts decried by Freud, "present her- or himself purely as an interpreter of the Text."3 In order to extricate oneself from this self-effacing obedience to theory, Mitchell contends, the critic, artist, or theorist, like the analyst and the analysand, must use-the theory, the object, the analyst-even if this using risks destroying that object or one's relationship to it. Only by attempting to destroy an object are we able to recognize it as an entity that exists in itself and break our identification with it: "We can only use it once we are not totally identified with it, nor even in a state of relationship or interrelationship with it."4

1.

Juliet Mitchell, "Theory as an Object," this issue, pp. 27-38.

D. W. Winnicott, "The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications" (1968), in his 2.

Playing and Reality(Hove: Brunner-Routledge, 2002), p. 86.

3.

Moustafa Safouan, Jacques Lacan and the Question of Psychoanalytic Training, ed. and trans.

Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 66-67.

4.

Mitchell, "Theory as an Object," p. 30.

OCTOBER113, Summer2005, pp. 3-8. ? 2005 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

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Only when the "good enough" theory survives our attempt to destroy it are we able to use it-just we are able to use the as, under other circumstances, mother, the analyst, or the other. But "the notion of the destruction of the theory should not be etiolated to some benign notion of play," Mitchell warns, summonof Winnicott and his theorizations of ing not only certain interpretations children's play, but also much contemporary art in which play (and its affiliate terms, "relating" and "interacting") frequently operates in a safe zone of modest contact with the object, or vague intersubjective engagement with the other. In contemporary art and criticism, it seems, two default positions-identification with the text as doxa and an ill-defined relating to the object or the other-avoid the risks involved in using theory.5 "The encounter between art and psychoanalysis has frequently been banal," Parveen Adams recalled in a 1991 special issue of October, "Rendering the Real."

"Naive musings on creativity, reductive speculation about authorial motivation, sentimental descriptions of aesthetic experience, all these have played too great a now they are often reiterated in the curatorial part in psychoanalytic studies"-and of the and the museum, and in the work of art itself.6 Yet if, as strategies gallery Silvia Kolbowski wrote in this magazine in 1995, galleries, museums, and the art press have long since delivered their decisive "rejection or simplification of psycho'work' in general," the present issue of October analytic theory or theoretical considers a diverse range of theoretical and artistic practices that take up psychoof the analysis.7 In place of "theory," these works-including photographs Shellburne and Sarah a recent video work Thurber psychoanalytic setting by Jones, on the psychoanalytic encounter by Glenn Ligon, an oral history installation by Kolbowski, and projects conducted on, or even in, the Freud Museum in London

by Susan Hiller, Cornelia Parker, and Sarah Lucas-all have recourse to the "analytic object," encompassing, in Mitchell's formulation, the person of the analyst, the technique, the setting, and the theory. This recent shift from "theory" to the complex of terms constellated by the "analytic object" returns us, albeit under a different aegis, to an earlier movement in the cultural reception of psychoanalysis.

In 1984, Joan Copjec noted that the work of Jacques Lacan had stimulated a change in the reception of psychoanalysis by literature and art. "The transference and Freud's essays on therapy and technique, formerly of little concern to those who analyzed artistic or literary texts, are now assuming a new importance," she observed, anticipating a more systematic use of psychoanalysis in cultural criticism that, by understanding it as a praxis and not exclusively a theory, would enter into the structural logic of psychoanalysis.8 Rather than apply psychoanalytic theory 5.

The discourse of the relational in art is currently structured primarily by Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics,trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with Mathieu Copeland (Dijon: Les Presses du Reel, 2002).

6.

Parveen Adams, Introduction, "Rendering the Real: A Special Issue," October58(Fall 1991), p. 3.

7.

Silvia Kolbowski, Introduction, "feminist IssueS," October71 (Winter 1995), p. 3.

8.

Joan Copjec, "Discipleship," introduction to "Discipleship: A Special Issue on Psychoanalysis," October28 (Spring 1984), p. 5.

Introduction

5

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ShellburneThurber.Cambridge, Mass.: Office with antique clawfooted couch. 2000. Courtesythe artist.

6

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directly to the interpretation of artistic or literary texts-"tattletaling" on "a repressed sexuality which contained . . . the tale of a text's meaning"-criticism informed by Lacanian theory would address the structural problem of the "relation of the subject to systems of representation."9 Psychoanalytic criticism, that is, now informed by Lacan's dual emphasis on language and transference, would conceive the artist, critic, or theorist as a subject "inhabited by language" (like the text) and motivated by transference to the "subjectsupposed to know,"or the master. Doubly distanced from the possibility of interpretation by language and by transference, this subject of psychoanalysiswould begin to perceive, and to reveal, "the fundamental distance between us and the point from which we speak."Alienated from her or his own speech, the critic, like the analyst or the analysand,would begin to acknowledge that "the exteriorizing tale of our own existence" begins with estrangement-from the master, the object, the text, and the self.10More than twenty years later, estrangement from the master (Freud as "a deceiving other, a text full of traps, contradictions, and uncertainties") has been replaced by an excessive identification with the Text, and transference and Freud's writings on psychoanalytic technique have all but disappeared from cultural criticism.11Yet, in some contemporary art, the milieu and cultural history of psychoanalysis are returning, while Mitchell's recent writings consider, not for the first time, what might be at stake in the survival of psychoanalytic theory.

Mitchell's essay, "Theory as an Object," was first presented in November 2003 at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London, on a panel that placed her in conversation with the artist Mary Kelly. Retracing their shared history, Mitchell described her own 1974 book Psychoanalysisand Feminismand Kelly's Post-Partum Document(1973-78) as results of "a period of profound collectivity," forged during their mutual participation in a women's liberation group in London. "I hope we have been destructive of psychoanalytic theory (though I know I have very often only related to it)," she declared, connecting the politics of feminism to the political potential of psychoanalysis, while also arguing that the survival of psychoanalysis depends on the political challenges that are posed to it. "[Psychoanalysis] has survived in the sense that matters: its survival can only be assured by the fact that it has changed, though certainly not utterly."12 What political challenges, then, are addressed to psychoanalysis today that might enable it to change, and so survive? In Psychoanalysisand Feminism,Mitchell claimed that "a rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud's works" would prove "fatal for feminism."13 Psychoanalysis, she asserted, offered the most profound analysis of patriarchy available to feminism, even if that analysis was often mistaken 9.

Ibid., p. 4.

10.

Ibid., pp. 5-6.

11.

Ibid., p. 6.

12.

Mitchell, "Theory as an Object," p. 36.

13. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysisand Feminism:Freud, Reich, Laing, and Women(New York: Vintage Books, 1974), p. xiii.

Introduction

7

for an alibi of patriarchy itself. Conversely, without the feminist critiques of psychoanalysis offered by artists including Kelly, who, in Post-Partum Document, used Lacanian theory to produce the absent maternal subject, psychoanalysis might not have changed sufficiently to serve feminism. In her introduction to the 1991 issue of October,Copjec claimed that psychoanalysis, "as a political analysis" structured by the relationship of the disciple to the master that is traditionally denied both "women" and "colonials," invited "a radical reconsideration of its objects and its aims"from those excluded And Adams would later frame the precisely subjects.14 the pertinence of of the Real" "the to demonstrate as objective "Rendering attempt to we the In this of consider, among issue, psychoanalysis politics representation."15 other questions, the politics of gender-or the challenge posed by gender to psychoMitchell's recent writings on siblings.16 analysis-through to a Contending that psychoanalysis is "trapped in the vertical"-confined of difference-Mitchell model hierarchical, intergenerational (sexual) argues that the Oedipal family romance is haunted by another drama, the love and strife between siblings.17 The sibling is "someone who threatens the subject's uniqueness" such that "the ecstasy of loving one who is like oneself is experienced at the same time as the trauma of being annihilated by one who stands in one's place."18 Gender, by this account, is not merely a different model of sexuality from the Oedipal, reproductive sexuality to which psychoanalysis has historically devoted its almost exclusive attention, but an entirely different mode of sexuality arising from another measure of difference.19 In sexual and in social terms, siblings "and all the lateral relations that take their cue from them" describe a dimension of experience neglected in psychoanalysis but, as we know, intensively explored in art since the 1950s.20 If the structural principle of sexual difference is binary, the structural principle of gender, according to Mitchell, is serial. Through the figure of the sibling, who threatens the subject's uniqueness, subjectivity arises through "minimal difference" and from the sister or brother, even as it is also forged in "maximal"-generational sexual-difference within the family. For Mitchell, postmodernism, influenced by feminism, pursues this lateral line of minimal difference, precipitating "a decline of the importance of descent and a rise of the importance of alliance."21 Siblings in turn offers a new logic through which to consider some of the pivotal developments in postmodernism: the disavowal of mastery and the displacement of the masterdisciple relation as a psychic and pedagogic paradigm; the weakening of Oedipal, conflict (exemplified by "the anxiety of influence") and the intergenerational 14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

Copjec, "Discipleship,"p. 6.

Adams, Introduction, p. 3.

See Juliet Mitchell, Siblings:Sexand Violence(Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2003).

Tamar Garb and Mignon Nixon, "A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell," this issue, p. 19.

Mitchell, Siblings,p. 10.

"AConversation with Juliet Mitchell," p. 24.

Mitchell, Siblings,p. 3.

Ibid., p. 4.

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concomitant emergence of peer groups and collaborative and collective practices in which there is "an increasing 'sameness' in the roles of women and men";22the predominance of the body and performative action, enacting the trauma that, for Mitchell, is an effect of the fear of annihilation by the other in both women and men; and the emergence of seriality as the dominant principle in numerous art forms and practices.

While it remains essential to examine these developments within broader patterns of historical and social change, the theory of "siblings"would also insist that the artistic practices of postmodernism reveal universal psychic structures which, though masked by modernism and psychoanalysis alike, are hardly absent from them. In her recent study of hysteria and in Siblings,Mitchell returns to the classic case studies of psychoanalysis in search of the missing. When, for example, we are prompted to think of Dora, the subject of Freud's famous "fragment of an analysis of a case of hysteria," as not only a hysterical daughter but also as an overshadowed and resentful younger sister, or to reflect upon the sexualized relationship between the Wolf Man and his older sister, we find fresh perspectives on the Oedipal narratives of modernism and the kinship structures that underlie them.23 It is, therefore, not only the shift from sexual difference to gender in postmodernism that "siblings" reveals, but also the dynamic interaction between gender and sexual difference, and between sex and violence, that psychoanalysis has failed to explore.

The one hundredth issue of October,published in 2002, reflected upon the question of obsolescence in contemporary culture, and perhaps no cultural theory has been more insistently relegated to obsolescence than psychoanalysis. Yet, as we observed in October100, the very condition of obsolescence "might have a critical role to play at this historical moment," and the contributions to this issue seem to bear out that hope.

Ibid.

22.

23.

Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas:ReclaimingHysteriaand theEffectsof SiblingRelationson the Human Condition(London: Penguin Books, 2000).

A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

TAMAR GARB and MIGNON NIXON

Mignon Nixon: The occasion for this conversation is the publication of Siblings: Sex and Violence (2003), which comes fast on the heels of your groundbreaking study of hysteria, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition in 2000. In both books you argue that psychoanalysis is trapped in a vertical paradigm that privileges interthe expense of lateral, and children-at generational relations-parents their which find intragenerational relationships origin in siblings. What galvanized your thinking about siblings? And how has this turn to the horizontal, lateral dimension of experience affected your thinking about feminism?

Mitchell: Freud says the Oedipus complex opens out onto a social family comJuliet At no point do I want to say that there is not a crucial intergenerational plex. relationship. Of course there is. This is not an attempt to displace that in any sense. It is an attempt to say that at certain points there is an interaction between the intergenerational and the lateral. This idea came from my clinical work as a psychoanalyst, from being stuck while trying to understand something about hysteria. It also came very specifically through the question of the male hysteric. But you ask about feminism, so perhaps I should backtrack and talk about my relationship to feminism.

Nixon: In 1974, you published Psychoanalysis and Feminism, the first major study to consider second-wave feminism and psychoanalysis together. Maybe you could start by telling us what brought you to write that book.

Mitchell: I had a gender-privileged educational background. My schooling was I Then very gender-egalitarian. got into a privileged university, which gave to treatment its In our family, my mother was the few women. pedestal breadwinner-which was tough for her in the very inegalitarian postwar years. It was only after university that I felt the full impact of the discrimination feminism protested against. In the early sixties, I was on the editorial board of the New Left Review. We decided to divide up what we saw as the tasks confronting postcolonial Marxism. I said I would take the subject of women. And the other editors objected that it was not a subject. I thought, OCTOBER113 Summer2005, pp. 9-26. ? 2005 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

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"Well, wait a minute, it's both a nonsubject and a subject." At that point, I thought it was very interesting that it wasn't seen as a subject.

Tamar Garb: Did you immediately know it was a subject? Or did it take you a while to work it out? Did you accept their edict?

Mitchell: No, no, no. I didn't accept the edict at all, but I was interested in where it came from. I thought it was part of the problem to see it as a nonsubject. Of course pragmatically, there were women. As a natural category, and as an ideological category in all the trappings of the feminine mystique, there were women. But politically there wasn't a category "subject: woman"; there was only "object: woman." For example, at that time, there was no category on the census except a daughter or a wife. There was an absent category. There had been feminism in history, of course, in which women constituted themselves as subjects. At the start of the seventies, people began to try to account for the absence of women as subjects, to explain it, both historically and theoretically.

I wanted to find women politically. After an aborted book on the position of women in England, I wrote "Women: The Longest Revolution" in 1966, which used Althusser's schema to examine the structures within which women were located: reproduction, sexuality, child care, interacting with the world of work.

I've begun to think that perhaps everything I do is because of something missing in what I've just done. So after "The Longest Revolution," I felt I hadn't considered how sexual difference was internalized so that, even when we didn't think about it, it is always there. With that problem in mind I started reading psychoanalysis and concluded Woman's Estate (1971) with a discussion of psychoanalysis and ideology, then eventually wrote Psychoanalysis and Feminism.

After the book, I felt I needed access to the material on which the theory was built, and I trained as a clinical psychoanalyst.

Psychoanalysis is about how one experiences gender in an internalized and that helped explain something that seemed very important to meway, that gender was completely accepted, beyond question, in a sense. It was this natural assumption that made it invisible-a nonsubject. At the start of secondwave feminism, most feminists saw Freud as the arch-patriarch. It was de rigeur for a feminist book to attack him. As I read Freud, I came to think, what we need to look at is the unconscious. The message of Psychoanalysis and Feminism was "don't let's throw the baby out with the bathwater." I was also very involved in thinking about radical anthropology at that time. In Siblings, I am still looking at kinship and trying to understand it. We haven't actually got a kinship analysis of the gendering of complex societies.

Nixon: Your work on siblings also arises from, or continues, your study of the history of hysteria. The title of the book you published in 2000, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria and the Effects of Sibling Relations on the Human Condition, already announces the importance you ascribe to sibling and peer contrast with Freud's relationships in the cultural expression of hysteria-in of as a theory hysteria repressed Oedipal desire, centering on the parent-

A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

11

child relationship. Before we explore that crucial move, perhaps you could tell us about your earlier interest in hysteria. When did hysteria first become an important question for you, and why?

Mitchell: Around the time I finished Psychoanalysis and Feminism, an interest was Freud's Dora case was emerging in women hysterics as protofeminists. filmed, produced in the theater, analyzed over and over. The interest was huge.

The question being asked was, What was the female hysteric's relation to feminism? So I began to wonder, What happened to the male hysteric? In of the as a malnegotiation terms, hysteria is understood psychoanalytic not to a universal: be itself has Therefore, only Oedipus complex. hysteria must the Oedipus complex be a universal, but hysteria has to be a universal.

And if hysteria is universal, it's important to ask what made it into a universal at the point of the transition from the pre-psychoanalytic writings of Freud to the establishment of psychoanalysis. How do you bring hysteria into universalism from being a particular category?

Nixon: So how did Freud arrive at the theory that hysteria was universal? What made him realize that there were male hysterics?

Mitchell: As we see in his pre-psychoanalytic writings, Freud was thinking of hysteria as a particular category-i.e., of abused people, as in the recovered-memory movement of recent decades. If, as he first hypothesized, hysteria had been confined to one population-women who had been abused by their fathersthen it would be a specific category rather than a universal. However, Freud has a case (which has been extracted from his letters to Fliess) of an hysterical man whom he was treating at the turning point of his move toward psychoanalysis. Freud got very entangled with this patient, regarding both the patient and himself as male hysterics. Afterward, he refers to his own petite hysterie, not just Dora's. With the male hysteric, we're into the universal, and from that universal of hysteria, we get the universal of the Oedipus complex.

The question of how you bring hysteria into universalism from being a particular category was an important one for feminism because, at the time, we were searching for a universalist paradigm. Later on, this was attacked by deconstruction and postmodernism, but at that time feminists were asking, Where is the origin of women's oppression? Why does this oppression exist crossculturally and transhistorically? So the same question in a sense was addressed to psychoanalysis: What is the universal of the psyche? The Oedipus complex is universal, whereas child abuse, though very common, is not universal.

Nixon: What then prompted you to take up the question of hysteria again, in a broader cultural perspective, with Mad Men and Medusas?

Mitchell: There were two questions. First, what happened to male hysteria? Early in the twentieth century, about ten years after the beginning of psychoanalysis, the male hysteric gradually began to disappear from the literature. This had interested me for a long time. The other question was simply, What happened to hysteria? By the early 1980s, hysteria had vanished. The DSM [Diagnostic

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and Statistical Manual] had renamed it histrionic personality disorder, and although the characteristicsof histrionic personality disorder would be the same as those in hysteria, in that transition to a behavioral disorder, you lost the symptom. And if you've lost the symptom, you've lost psychic conflict, because a symptom is always conflictual. And if you've lost psychic conflict, you've lost the dynamic unconscious, so you've lost the universal again. You have instead a specific population of histrionic personality disorders, as we see, for example, in the repressed memory movement and elsewhere. You and I aren't going to have a histrionic personality disorder, somebody else is, so to speak. So we've lost the actual terrain in which we could all be hysterics.

In psychoanalysis, hysteria was no longer a diagnosis. Of course, psychoanalysis doesn't diagnose psychiatrically in any case, but it has to specify areas of mental disorder. And hysteria was out as a diagnostic category in psychoanalysis as it was in psychiatric literature. So we have a prevalence and again an absence, an absence in the theory but an unacknowledged presence in the empirical work.

Garb:You knew to call it hysteria, always?

Mitchell:Yes, and I talked with colleagues about it. There was a good paper by Eric Brenman called "Hysteria" in 1985, in which he records the same experience, talking with colleagues who said, "We don't use it as a category, but we know what you mean, and we do use it when we're thinking about our patients." Because of my concern with the male hysteric, I was, like other people, drawn to consider the distinction between hysteria and the so-called traumatic neuroses of war. To be reductive about it, I suppose it was predominantly the experience of trauma in hysteria that began to interest me. The experience might not be actual trauma; it might not be an earthquake or abuse. It might be a screen memory of something traumatic. A screen memory is your narrative history of what mattered in your life. So if there was a traumatic element-something that was experienced as traumatic but not a trauma limited to a specific population, as in the case of abuse-I began to realize this hysterical material was notjust about desire and its permutations.

The terrain was certainly Oedipal. And there we have got the trauma of the father's law of castration. There's some interesting work in Freud's Inhibitions, Symptoms,and Anxiety(1926) to think about. But with my patients and with my colleagues we hadn't been thinking psychoanalyticallyabout trauma in relation to siblings. In their analysis, my patients were touching on this, and I was not picking up on it. I never analyzed being a big sister or being a little brother in the transference. It was incidental in a sense. It was occasional. The way one interpreted siblings was, "Every other patient in the waiting room is preferred to you, or every other patient is going to see me during the vacation, or I'm going off with my actual children and not you, who are just my surrogate children." The direction was from parent to child. Which of course happens. As I say, the interaction, the interpenetration of the horizontal and

A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

13

ShellburneThurber.Buenos Aires: Green plush analyst's chair with antimacassar. 1999.

Courtesythe artist.

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OCTOBER

the vertical is always there. But one didn't analyze siblings in any systematic One didn't think of oneself or way, or with one's own countertransference. the patient as sister or brother. Except occasionally when it was very, very obvious. And when it's very obvious, what you've got is the overt. You haven't got the latent content behind it. You've only got the manifest content if your patient says to you, "Oh God, you're just like my big sister." Your big sister might in that case be standing for the mother, or somebody else. Listening for latent contents of sibling dynamics, too, was all-important.

Garb:I'm interested in how you came to that realization. Was it a sudden insight, or was it a slow, systematic buildup, an accretion of cases where a picture begins to emerge?

Mitchell: In the sibling case, it came as a sudden revelation as the Oedipus complex moved aside. It had been like a rock. I had been looking at hysteria through all the aspects of the Oedipus complex-considering the theories of Freud, relational work-and Lacan, object relations, suddenly this rock moved aside to reveal these dancing children. So I went back and looked at my own case histories, my own patients, and then decided to look at the classical ones.

And there was Dora with Otto, her brother. The first onset of Dora's hysteria is as childhood hysteria. There are very interesting articles on childhood hysteria suggesting that it is normative to have hysteria in childhood. But if it's normative to have a childhood hysteria, that must nevertheless tell you something. If all children have a hysterical episode-if they all stop eating, or go in for excessive self-dramatization, or experience a terrible sense of nonexistence-if these are the behavioral aspects of hysteria that occur regularly in childhood, and then normally pass, we should look at them in this way. Look at Little Hans. There is an obvious case. Look at the Wolf Man and his sister.

The small boy goes mad in relation to his sister's sexual stories. The Wolf Man and his sister are having sexual relations. That sister is there. There is something going on with these siblings.

Garb:You make a case in Siblings for the word "trauma" in relation to hysteria. You categorize it differently from the Oedipus crisis, or the moment of castration anxiety. So there is a distinction set up between trauma on the one hand and castration anxiety on the other. Or are they both traumas?

Mitchell: I think the castration complex involves trauma. The possibility of not having the phallus, realized in a woman, is traumatic. And I think people do have delusional reactions to seeing the phallus that are akin to a delusional response to trauma. I do think there is a traumatic aspect there. There's a narcissistic investment in the phallus, so the danger is to the subject identified with the phallus. But I think it's different with a sibling. The response to the appearance of a sibling is earlier and relates to an earlier representation of the body-ego. Lacan would call it an "imaginary," as opposed to "symbolic" relation. But in fact, both the phallic and its sibling-subject body-ego are is in resolving them that the Symbolic enters the picture. The Imaginary-it

A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

15

sibling relation doesn't relate to the phallus. We could say that acknowledging the sibling as both the same and other ends the mirror phase. Twins show us how difficult this is-and how necessary.

Nixon: How would you describe the attitude of psychoanalysis to siblings? Has it ignored siblings, missed them, repressed them?

Mitchell:Well, it's impossible to miss siblings. There have been attempts to look at siblings. But they don't have any staying power. And I think they don't have any staying power because they're subsidiary. They're not an autonomous area within the theory-there isn't a theory of siblings, a theory of a horizontal axis. As I have said, Lacan makes them a part of the Imaginary world.

Freud makes them a continuation into the social "after"the Oedipus complex. I'm being speculative here, but another element, which we haven't brought in yet but which interests me very much, is the death drive. In psychoanalysis, there is such opposition to the hypothesis of a death drive that death itself vanishes. The problem of death goes in different directions, for instance into aggression, and it isn't sustained. And I think you need siblings for thinking about death, and death for thinking about siblings. I had already made the death drive a major part of my thinking about hysteria. So even before I got to siblings, there was the death drive waiting. As an example, take the little boy's game of representing his mother's coming and going with the cotton reel-the fort/da game. This records a primary utterance. I suggest that the sibling organizes this early phonemic experience. I wanted to look at that chain along the line of the death drive rather than the line of sexual difference, although of course sexual difference comes in, too.

Nixon: Maybe we could turn to the question of the relationship between sex and violence, because that's the subtitle of the book: Siblings:Sex and Violence.

Mitchell:They made me take out "gender."

Nixon:Why? Mitchell:It's a "boo"word for publishers at the moment. Ten years ago, they would put the word "gender" in if you were writing about an oak tree, and now it's taken out if you arewriting about gender.

Nixon: So it was to have been ...

Mitchell:Siblings:Gender,Sex, and Violence.

Nixon: "Gender"was first.

Garb:But should we dwell on the violence question? Can you tell us a little about how you understand violence in this psychoanalytic sense? What is violence composed of?

Mitchell:Killing or being killed.

Garb:It's about survival and staking your own space?

Mitchell:Yes, the instinct to survive. It might mean that you have to kill to survive.

Which is what war is.

Nixon: In Mad Men and Medusas,you argue that one of the effects of the disappearance of hysteria as a universal category was the loss of the dimension of

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violence. You say that when hysteria migrates into the feminine and remains there-when our "hysteria becomes woman," as I think you put it-then sense of the role of violence in hysteria is lost. Because violence is culturally gendered masculine. In Siblings, you extend this argument to suggest that violence is a universal feature of that relationship.

Mitchell: I think it is normative, or normal even, for displaced siblings to feel violent toward the person who displaces them. So you get that oscillation between an extension of your narcissistic love for a friend and your violence toward a person who has displaced you. I use the technical concept of "reversal into the opposite." The ability to reverse into the opposite feelings of love and hatred can be seen vividly in children. Freud said hate is older than love.

You need to hate. I think it's very important that we've all had the experience of hating our actual sibling, or our putative sibling, or our substitute sibling, the person who stands in our place. Donald Winnicott, in his silent dialogue, or disagreement, with Melanie Klein, claimed, "one thing I know is that the hatred of the mother has to come first"-before hatred of the baby and Laius's filicide.

I've wondered where that hatred sibling. Jocasta's always came from. Did it descend from the skies? Was it a kind of Kristevan abjection? Is there something sui generis about parturition that makes hate? That doesn't quite work analytically for me. But if we've all had siblings that we've hated, then we're going to see our child in a hating way.

Garb:How does that conversion happen?

Mitchell:From hate to love? I think it's a reversal into the opposite. It's a real switch.

Garb:Is there a catalyst?

Mitchell: No. Reversal into the opposite is just that. I don't think there is a catalyst.

Garb:It can veer back and forth. It is never fixed.

Mitchell: Right. There is that line by Wilfred Owen, "I am the enemy you killed, my friend" [Strange Meeting, 1918]. He kills the German soldier, his enemy, but he is actually his brother, his friend, too. The awful thing is that the other is only a reflection of Owen himself. You are like your sibling. A twin is a reflection of the self. There is a wonderful study of twins by Anna Freud's partner, Dorothy Burlingham. The twin calls himself "Other-one Burt," calls himself, that is, by the other twin's name. As I was saying earlier, I think there is a mirror which the mother phase that is independent of the Lacanian Imaginary-in refers the child to the mirror-and which is also different from Winnicott's idea that the mother mirrors the true self to the child, mirrors the baby to itself. I think it is important to consider the experience of the baby looking at an older child. The baby becomes ecstatic watching a toddler. It is really, really entranced by that toddler or even by a child in the latency period. Watching the contained movement of the older child, it feels coordinated in the other child's still excitable, but nevertheless controlled, movements. I see that as a crucial mirroring, too. Again, it has to do with the body of the body-ego.

Nixon: So there is a mirroring from which the mother is absent, and in this mirroring,

17

A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

the sibling, or the sibling surrogate, plays the role of facilitating the baby's development of a self-image. If psychoanalytic descriptions of child development do not pay enough attention to this dynamic, what about parents? How aware are parents of sibling violence, for example?

Mitchell:I think as parents we don't want to see sibling violence. When I speak to groups about this, afterward someone will say, "MyGod, I was the youngest of six, and you're just reminding me of how my parents always thought that I was safe on the street if I was out with my older siblings. Little did they know that I was being tortured and was in terror of my life the moment they shut the front door." This is always there. Torture is there.

Garb:Often semi-repressed, though. There must be cases where the parents don't see any signs, or the signs aren't there at all. Where has that energy gone?

Mitchell: It could be inhibited. It could be sublimated for some reason, into achievement, for example. It could also be that the parents turn a blind eye.

Garb:So is it a universal rule that it is there?

Mitchell: Yes. As Winnicott says, you must have access to hate.

Garb:There's damage done if it's sublimated or repressed.

Mitchell:But the hate could be expressed toward another child. For example, somebody who has a handicapped sibling might be overly frightened that their violence might actually kill the child. There is a short story called "The Mother"

by Elizabeth David to which I like to refer. The eldest child in a Mumbai slum family is proud that she has looked after all her younger sisters and brothers.

The story beautifully reflects how interwoven with her caring is her wish for a child's life herself-she threatens to throw her crying baby under a bus if he doesn't stop, and then feels terror, when he isn't breathing normally, that she has killed him. It's not that every child does something violent, but every child has moments of wanting to throw his or her baby brother under a bus.

Garb:Perhaps we could talk now about the imbrication of sex and violence. When incest or rape enters into the equation, that's the space in which the erotic and the violent come together. Could you talk a little bit about the intersections between violence and sex?

Mitchell:Sibling sex is the most prevalent form of abuse in England.

Garb:Male to female?

Mitchell: Older sibling to younger, usually older brother to younger sibling. I gave

a talk two or three years ago and referred to this at the Institute of Psychoanalysis.A colleague said that most adolescent patients had had sex with their siblings. Melanie Klein even thinks it might be benign and helpful in situations of deprivation.

Garb: Do you always see it as a manifestation

of violence

expressed

through dom-

ination?

Mitchell:No. I think it could be a babes-in-the-wood situation. In Arundhati Roy's The Godof Small Things (1998), the siblings have a sexual relationship that is comforting. If you sleep next to somebody, if you're cuddling up to somebody for

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comfort, and you have this need for love and identification that the twins she describes have for each other, then it may easily become a sexual thing. I don't think it's always a relationship of violence or domination. But I think there's a potentiality for it to become so through reversal. To my mind, the conditions of hate-love reversal make sibling incest precarious, probably dangerous.

Garb:Do you think vengeance is at stake there, then?

Mitchell: I think you'd have to take each case on its own merits. In Mad Men and Medusas, I look at Iago and jealousy. It's all played out on a lateral level. lago deludes himself that Othello has had an affair with Emilia, Iago's wife. So he is going to make Othello jealous. There are a lot of "siblings" around there.

They're all lateral relations. Who are you mostjealous of? You're most jealous of your sibling. You're certainly envious if your sibling has a piece of chocolate that is bigger than yours. It's just the name of the game to be jealous. I want to use 'jealousy" rather than "envy" here, though envy can of course come in.

It's mentioned somewhere that Joan Riviere started with jealousy and that Klein turned her study of jealousy into a study of envy. I don't think the baby post utero is particularly jealous, but I think by the time the sibling comes along, it is jealousy that we're talking about. I was talking to some therapists recently in a church hall, and the vicar asked me if we could talk of jealousy rather than of hatred. "Could we change it to jealousy?" he asked. And I said, "Actually, I'd much rather hate than be jealous. Jealousy is much more corroding." There's an energy to hatred which I think is very important. There is a survival aspect to hatred in itself. You've almost got to hate the person you kill if it's a matter of killing or being killed.

Nixon: So the Oedipal passions of violence-the wish to kill the father or the mother-are in equally present sibling relationships?

Mitchell: We hate our mothers, no doubt, as babies. When we say, "I hate you because you won't let me stay up late," that is hate, a sort of purity of hate.

But I think you hate your sibling, too.

Nixon: I'm interested in how those axes might be coordinated. Does one deflect from the other? Let's say, for example, you hate your mother for not letting you stay up late, so you form common cause in that moment with your sibling, but then you hate your sibling for some other offense, and that sends you back to the parents. Sibling relationships, as you point out, are volatile; the movement from love to hate can take place in the blink of an eye. With the parent, at least post-Oedipally, the passions are more settled, less mobile.

So is it the fast-changing quality of passion in the sibling relation that makes it so hard to maintain, or so easy to lose?

Mitchell: So that we lose it in the theory as well? Certainly with the parent, the hatred goes, doesn't it? But I think it can also go with the sibling. Perhaps it's gone somewhere else, but it seems to remain accessible with the sibling. So you can turn it into ethnic war. When you need hatred, you can access it again. It's right there just below the surface. I think we're probably looking at

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19

a kind of continuation of the paranoid-schizoid position. We all go in for normative splitting, normative paranoia, and these processes may sometimes look so pathological that we don't see them as psychic processes on a continuum but as abnormal processes, as negative processes. But of course they're terribly prevalent in our everydaylife. You can easily access this hatred at another level.

Garb:What about the way in which sibling relations are managed by the mother?

Can you explore a little how your conception of the mother differs from classic psychoanalytic theory of the law of the father, and what the implications of the shift from the law of the father to what you call "the law of the mother" might be?

Mitchell:It was of course polemical to call it "the law of the mother." It wasjust saying, "Wait a minute, isn't there something amiss with the exclusivity of the law of the father in terms of kinship positions that are assumed?" For example, why is the mother's brother always equated to the father? Why isn't he seen as the mother's brother in a lateral position? In families, you've got two sets of laterality. You've got child siblings and adult siblings.

Garb:Two gangs.

Mitchell:Yes, two gangs, and two relationships: the bad and the good-warfare and care and protection-and the two possibilities on horizontal axes along the wife-husband-siblingline and on the children-sibling line. The mother will be looked after by the brother, and the brother will help her look after the children. So you've got two lines. You asked me at the beginning for evidence of being trapped in the vertical. One way that we're trapped in the vertical is that we can't think of the mother's brother as the mother's brother. The mind instantly makes him a substitute father. That's an instance of it. The brother is moved to the vertical, becomes the uncle, and is acting as a father.

So what is the mother's role? The mother is alwaysnegotiating between the children. That's what I wanted to call "the law of the mother."It's actually a double law. There are two aspects to it. The child, when a sibling comes along, wants to be in one of two places. The child feels banished and wants to be either the baby that has replaced it-wants itself back as the baby-or wants to be the mother that has had the baby. It hunts between those two positions, which again are the positions the hysteric hunts between: a parthenogenic mother-"I'm going to have a baby from myself,"which would be an hysterical birth, or couvade, the hysteric'sfantasy-and the fantasy of being a baby.

So imagine, here I am, a toddler. Baby sister is born. I want to be that baby sister, because that's me, so I put on nappies again. Or I want to be the mother and produce that baby. Those are the two positions. The mother's task is to say, "Well, you can help me and be like me, but of course you can't actually yet have a baby, and babies don't come from ourselves." Castration doesn't really address how we know we can't have a baby. There has to be some prohibition, a law against a child having a baby. It's not just realistic.

We have the same problem when the phallus shifts into the realistic. In both

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cases, we need a symbolic law. You've got to symbolize the absence of the possibility of having a baby. The mother will do that for you. The mother will also

say,"Okay,you were the baby like that baby, but now you're the little girl who is two and a half, and you have a sister. And you never know, there might be another baby after this one." So the mother introduces what I call "seriality."It's important that we have not only pairing illustrations. The most common contemporary type in the West is a two-child family, so we are accustomed to twos. But it's this seriality that, it seems to me, is so incredibly important.

Postmodernism attacks the binary. I say that in this field there is a binary thinking, there's a binary about sexual difference. But seriality shows we also need other modes of thinking. The postmodern assault on the binary neglects the fact that seriality is already in place along the horizontal axis.

Nixon: In both of these books, in different ways, you address the cultural condition of postmodernism. In Mad Men and Medusas, you point to the way in which hysteria is creatively mobilized by some postmodernist practices, through performativity in particular. And in Siblings, through the model of seriality, you suggest that postmodernism activates a lateral dimension of social experience, which is obscured in modernism by the vertical axis of the Oedipal.

In both books you help us rethink postmodernism by concentrating on relations between sibling-peers.

But I'm intrigued by your use of the term did How settle on this term? Where does it come from? "seriality." you Mitchell: I suppose somewhere in the back of my mind was Sartre's distinction between series and nexus, and series within groups. I'm still going to have to work on what I mean by "series," but I mean something that is not binary, that is serial in the quite simple sense of one after another, sequential. As a shorthand: it is where replication becomes symbolized into seriality. "The new baby was going to be me, but it isn't"-that sets the process in motion.

Garb: I think it's also important to emphasize that seriality is different from repetition.

Mitchell: Repetition is a response to trauma. As with replication, seriality is the of the repetition of trauma. That's the movement. In my symbolization schema-of course I'm being schematic, and of course it's much more serious for some than others-somebody comes along who you think is you. You've been looking forward to it, but this person replaces you, displaces you. You then have a traumatic reaction, which means that the psychic protective shield has been broken into; there's too much excitation. You feel in chaos, you feel fragmented, and you don't feel that you're anybody. You feel annihilated. Then, you begin to recover. But you begin to recover by knowing that a bit of you is the same as a sibling. After all, both of you are at least in the same kin relationship to the mother. But you've also got something that's different. That's what the mother does; she says, "I love you both as much as each other because you are both my beloved children. But you are big, he is little, he's a boy, and you're a girl." You're the same in relation to the kinship situation, and you're different

A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

1,

I

I

V

I

o

Thurber.Cambridge, Mass.: Office with Harvard chair and ochre-colored fabric couch. 2000.

Courtesythe artist.

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in relation to individuation. That seemed to me to be like a series. So seriality is a way of theorizing what happens to the compulsive repetition that we know happens after trauma. People traumatically, compulsively repeat something.

They may be repeating something that is a compulsive repetition of sibling trauma. But if you can symbolize that repetition or replication into seriality, if you can stop the compulsive repetition by symbolizing repetition into seriality, then you're notjust going around in a huis clos.

Garb:Seriality has to do with something that is not identical but is related.

Mitchell:That's right. Even more than related; it is the samebut different. Take the example of a bus queue. This goes back to Sartre, or Laing's rewriting of Sartre'sidea: you've all got the same object, which is the bus, and you're all the same-humans in a bus queue-but each one of you is different.

Garb:This is very productive for aesthetics. Seriality has become a sort of buzzword in thinking about transformations of objects in the sixties, and you offer a very productive way of thinking about the implications of units that recur but are not identical. Often seriality and repetition are used interchangeably in aesthetic theories.

Mitchell:They certainly shouldn't be.

Garb:What you are pointing to is a way of distinguishing between them.

Mitchell:It's probably like Monet's Haystacks.

Garb:Precisely. Monet's Haystacksare a series and not a repetition.

Mitchell:What he was doing was to look at the same thing again and again and again in the sun and the light and the wind. Each time it's different, though it's also the same.

Garb:And it has to do with time, with temporality.

Mitchell:Absolutely.And so does birth, sibling birth. It has to do with what comes after you or before you. The knowledge of the past (and hence of present and future) starts with the transformation of the perpetual present of repetition (seen so clearly in the compulsion to repeat) into the temporality of seriality.

Nixon:How does gender intersect with this account of seriality?The shift from sexual difference to gender is a defining movement in postmodernism, and it is also a central problematic in Siblings.

Mitchell:That takes me to performativity and my disagreement with Judith Butler. I think gender has always been with us, and gender transformation has always been with us, and it is cross-culturallyalwayswith us. Men have parthenogenic fantasies of giving birth, and they have hysterical fantasies. When siblings are sex partners, the relationship is not primarily a reproductive one. It's a sexual play. That's why people like Klein could think it was benign. The twins in Roy's The Godof Small Thingsare not worried about having babies. So there's a sexual play that is not primarily reproductive. It does not confuse generations as does parental incest. Now, in relation to its interaction, it's parthenogenic intragenerationally-laterally and horizontally. I call it gender because I think it's sex without a dominance of the reproductive drive. This sexual play-playing

A Conversation with Juliet Mitchell

23

games with each other-that's what I think gender is, as opposed to sexual difference, which does involve an identification with the mother or the father post-Oedipally,post-castration complex. In addition to sexual difference, there is this lateral sexuality which is not reproductive, not primarily anyway.So I think whatJudith Butler is describing has alwaysbeen there.

In sexual difference, to be one is not to be the other; to be feminine means not to be masculine. This condition of difference is not there in the gender of siblings-this is why transgendering has become in a sense so easy to think about-it is already there in the condition of gender, but not in the condition of sexual difference. In the seventies, I had an exchange with Robert Stoller when I reviewed his book The TranssexualExperiment(1975).

Stoller was arguing that the transsexual was not psychotic because he does know how to symbolize sexual difference. Stoller's example was a boy named John who wanted to be a girl. John acknowledged that there were boys and girls, saying he knew they were different, "like snowflakes." I argued, "No, John's saying these two things are different, just like siblings are different from each other, but they are not sexually differentiated into two categories in which one is the meaning of the other-two completely interdependent categories that have no meaning outside a reference to each other's terms, a binary." Different, but the same as well. They're snowflakes.

Garb:If gender is in the register of seriality, then there are many more subject positions than just male and female. There are multiple possibilities for subject positions.

Mitchell: Absolutely. And for subject-to-subjectrelations.

Garb:Subject-to-subject, but not defined as male-female. So after one has gone through the whole Oedipal thing, and one has made one's identification, and is in the orbit of sexual difference, after one takes up one's position, interwoven with that identification are the residual gender relations of childhood.

Mitchell:Yes. Or take it to work. Mignon asked me about the social effects. Most work on social segregation in the labor force tells us that one of the reasons why women still receive lower pay than men despite all the equal pay acts (despite all these laws, women's pay rarely exceeds 80 percent of men's, or the job becomes feminized, debased) is that you've got gender segregation before you get to work. You've got gender segregation of girls and boys as pairing, not as binary. So girls play with girls in the playground. Boys play with boys in the playground. It's one of the ways in which the mother differentiates for the child, tells the child what it means to be a little girl or a little boy. But it's as a pairing relationship, not as a sexually differentiated relationship. That could be a pairing within the same-sex seriality, but they're already segregated into a position within seriality. And it's a nonreproductive one. Women like to work with women, and men like to work with men, and men like to fight with men, and women like to knit with women. There are already gender relationships which use gender difference as a pairing within the seriality.

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Garb:What about when gender difference becomes same-sex and libidinal?

Mitchell:Certainly. Why not? That has alwaysalready been in place.

Garb:So your theory destroys the normative?

Mitchell: That's right. It says homosexuality (same-sex love) has always already been in place. You don't have to read homosexuality off the Oedipal. You might-homosexuality might be more Oedipally determined-but it could also be a development of same-sex relationships: brother to brother, sister to sister, within that lateral. But it won't be reproductive.

Garb:Does that mean that you see reproductive sexuality as an instant in the development of sexuality, or a moment within the formation of the subject?

Mitchell:I still see it as Oedipal, as castration, with an identification following on.

That's one mode of sexuality. Gender is anothermodeof sexuality.

Garb:What about menopausal women? Because of course there is a moment of nonreproductive sexuality which takes one back to a pre-Oedipal, "gender" definition of potential sexuality.

Mitchell:The postmenopausal woman is sexual. She will not be reproductive, but that doesn't mean sexuality has ended. There is lateral sexuality. My husband is an anthropologist and has worked with the Lodagaa in northern Ghana.

There, when a woman reached menopause, she was called a man. It didn't mean she didn't exist as a person. The postmenopausal woman had a subject position, but it wasn't a reproductive one. Through gender, at last there's a space for the sexuality of postmenopausal women. But everybody's always known that there's sexuality postmenopausally. We've only seen it as not there because we've always read sexuality as leading to reproduction, in a religious way almost. And so has psychoanalysis. This takes us back to Freud's ThreeEssayson Sexuality[1901-05], which is actually still a very revolutionary book.

Garb:Let's go back now to the mother and the place of the mother in relation to this new conceptualization of her role in socialization. Would you say that this is the first really feminist account of the mother?

Mitchell: I think it puts the mother as subject, whereas in earlier accounts the mother was collapsed into the feminine, as the petit a, the object. Femininity is an object status, but the mother is not. There has always been the phallic mother, but what about the subject-mother? There is subject motherhood in this. Because she's a lawgiver. She's in the place of the law.

Nixon: Could you talk a little more about the distinction you draw between subject/object and subject/subject relationships? If I understand correctly, you argue that subject/subject relationships become possible along the axis of gender, the lateral, whereas along the vertical axis of sexual difference, relationships are more subject/object. Other psychoanalytic theorists, drawing on object-relations theory-I'm thinking of Jessica Benjamin in particular-have called for a theorization of intersubjectivity.My sense is that your notion of subject/subject relations is different.

Mitchell:We're in an area where it is quite important to tease out differences. I'm

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25

saying that if you've got brothers or sisters, you are in subject/subject relationships with them. This is something that is independent of the Oedipus complex.

Nixon: So in all lateral relations, there is a subject/subject relation?

Mitchell:No. Subject/subject might be the basis of friendship. But you might also tend to stand object/object, which would be the case for two strangers. So you can be a stranger to me, and I can be a stranger to you. I can be a friend of yours, and you can be a friend of mine. When we're friends, we're two subjects. When we're strangers, we're two objects. Then, we're othering the other, putting everything into "other" positions. Or we can move into samesubject positions. Then we're friends together.

Nixon:Let's return to Winnicott since your article "Theory as an Object" focuses on his work.*Winnicott is associated with object-relations theory in psychoanalysis, which has become an increasingly important theoretical field for the humanities, one that is sometimes invoked in connection with a current critical term, "relational."But these terms-intersubjective and relational-seem far more positive, even idealizing, than what you describe in SiblingsMitchell:I'm going to interrupt you here. If you are always looking at interrelationality, you're looking at what Winnicott calls "relating."And we're not always relating, we've also got to "use."The movement between relating and using is the movement toward the ability to symbolize. We're talking about a world in which, yes, we can relate as subjects, but actually,if we're subject-to-subject, we need to be able to use the other in a subject position. That's why I'm interested in Winnicott's notion of the use of an object. The baby who, in Winnicott's terms, has usedthe mother has been able to create the mother as something in the external world. Sibling relationships symbolize a later version of that same thing. If you kill the sibling, and the sibling survives, then you have created the sibling as other than yourself, an other who is the same and different. You use each other, and that's friendship. Now, you can regress to relating, as you might do at a football match. But if on the other hand you are going to be a team of people helping to produce an art objectGarb:Can using become exploiting?

Mitchell: No. "Using" for Winnicott is a very positive term, a very, very positive term.

Go back to the baby who can use the mother. The baby who has used the mother has been really angry that the breast hasn't come when it wanted it, and has bitten the nipple and violently destroyed the mother in fantasy. Then, in Klein's terms, the baby would become paranoid because the mother might retaliate. But in Winnicott's terms, the mother comes back having survived the baby's anger. After the mother has survived, the baby has an image of the mother that belongs to the external world, an image of the mother as other.

Now the baby has moved toward a recognition that the mother has survived and exists independent of its destruction. In "Theory as an Object," I'm saying * Juliet Mitchell,"Theoryas an Object,"this issue,pp. 27-38.

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that Winnicott didn't take that analysis as far as he should have, which is to the sibling. This is the same thing at a later level. You're not the baby, you're a toddler. You hate the sibling, you destroy the sibling, you try to kill the sibling. You might try to push the baby off the bed. But either Mother stops you or you don't go far enough, and the baby survives. And then you know that there's another "you" in the external world, another you who is not going to be quite you because this baby is externally itself, but you also know that there is a you that is external to the baby or your older sibling, so you can use each other as two subject positions. And relating would be a regression.

Nixon: So the crucial thing is to be able to use the other?

Mitchell:Yes. Like we're using each other now. We pick up on each other's ideas. I use your ideas, you use mine, and something grows between us. You could say that's exploitation, or you could say it's using. You can do the same with me as I with you. We could do the same to each other-it is this potential equality which, if realized, stops it being exploitation. The generational imbalance, the baby's absolute dependence, and, in this context, the absolute, superior powers of the mother stop the baby's use of the mother from being exploitative. Of course this use, people can use others in exploitative ways and do so all the time-but which is about allowing the other to exist in the outside world, is reciprocal. If I don't use you in this way, I can't be used-i.e., made external to you-either.

Garb:It's about reciprocity.

Mitchell: Actually, I want to backtrack because I think we might be making a wrong turn. I want to return to something important that Mignon said a while back that we passed over because I interrupted her. We were talking about inter-

subjectivity and relationality, and Mignon asked if there was something idealizing about their use. I think we are moving into idealization again here. "Use" becomes a possibility because by surviving destruction, the is for exterconstituted the it object already is-something subject as what nal. Then the subject can conceive it is, which implies that the subject, too, is external. This isn't really reciprocity, but neither is it exploitation or equality.

It's use, because you are two subject positions that negotiate the use of the other. Or it could be three subject positions, or four subject positions. That

is why I got interested in groups and why I started training with groups.

Nixon: Is that the direction your work is taking now, toward thinking about groups?

Mitchell:Yes, it is. I think it's very interesting that Klein told Wilfred Bion to stop working with groups because it would take him away from psychoanalysis. But I don't think it needs to if you bring siblings in. All you need in psychoanalysis is sex, the unconscious, and death. If you have them, you've got psychoanalysis!

-London,

June 19, 2004

Theory as an Object*

JULIET MITCHELL

To consider the question of theory as an object, I am going to reverse a trend and resort in the first instance to anthropomorphism. I am on safe analytic grounds, for in object relations psychoanalysis, the "object"is a person, invariably someone of significance to the subject. That a person should be seen as an object was offensive to second-wave feminism, which, with some justification, felt that behind the idealization of the mother was the denigration of the woman as a "sexual object." That the feminine occupies the position of object, not subject, is endorsed in Lacan's rereading of Freud. If we anthropomorphize theory, where does theory stand in the gender stakes?

A few months after the revolutionary moment of May 1968, Donald Winnicott, extraordinary pediatrician and important psychoanalyst, gave a brief paper to the New York Psychoanalytic Society entitled "The Use of an Object and Relating through Identification."l A theme of his argument is the positive use of destructiveness, which, given the date of his presentation, suggests that Winnicott, unlike several other colleagues, may implicitly have been on the side of demonstrating youth who hoped (in vain, as it turned out) that May '68 was "the beginning of the end."

I am going to use Winnicott's brief, and apparently simple, paper as a focal point. But first I need to situate myself autobiographically in the discussion about art, criticism, and psychoanalytic theory that this issue of Octoberis attempting to open up. I am not an art critic or historian; the nearest I can come to understanding the problems posed by art to psychoanalysis is through literature, which is the field of my original training. My own entry into psychoanalysis came about through the exigencies of the predicament of women. When I was first interested in the position of women in the early 1960s, women did not exist, in a sense rather different from Lacan's formulation "the woman does not exist," though ultimately connected to that gnomic utterance. Women were classified as wives of * This essay is adapted from a paper delivered at the symposium "Theory as an Object," organized

by Catherine Grant and Sarah James at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London and held on November 29, 2003.

1.

D. W. Winnicott, "The Use of an Object and Relating through Identification" (1968), in Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Publications, 1971).

OCTOBER113, Summer2005, pp. 27-38. ? 2005 October Magazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

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their husbands or daughters of their fathers. In Sheila Rowbottom's words, they were "hidden from history."

Where they were hidden in the many discussions throughout the 1950s, and of course before, was in "the family"; for one missing woman there was a plethora of family studies. Reflecting on that obvious hiding place led me to write "Women: The Longest Revolution" (1966), in which I tried to locate with the women in what I saw as the chief structures of the family-sexuality set child-all of the of socialization the partner, reproduction population, within, and interactive with, the larger economy.2 My subsequent move to psyHere, I will select one fact: a response choanalysis was highly overdetermined. that staggered me was one in which I was taken to task for not having underand cognate terms. This stood that women and the family were coterminous described in Julia had, of course, been my problematic.

(This is excellently Swindells and Lisa Jardine's What's Left?)3 Quintin Hoare wrote of my "Women: The Longest Revolution": We are warned that this the article will not provide an historical narrative of women's position. But what, in fact, happens is that she excludes history from her analysis. How can one analyse either the position of women today, or writings on the subject ahistorically? It is this which prevents her from realizing that the whole historical development of women has been within the family; that women have worked and lived within its space and time. We may all agree that her place should not be there, but it is. Any discussion of the position of women which does not start from the family as the mode of her relation with society becomes abstract.4 The depth of our unconscious assumption of this equation of women and the family, the gap between women's experience of themselves and the construction of femininity, was one thrust toward psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974) took women into sexual difference, and it took the family into wider kinship laws.5 After writing Psychoanalysis and Feminism, I trained as a psychoanalyst, undoubtedly for personal reasons but deliberately because I could not see clinical how I could continue my interest if I did not have the material base-the work-from which the theories arose. Because of this motive, my gut reaction to our subject, to the question of how art and criticism might use psychoanalytic theory, was to believe that the dilemma of anyone using psychoanalytic theory as an 2.

Juliet Mitchell, "Women: The Longest Revolution," New LeftReview40 (1966).

3.

Julia Swindells and LisaJardine, What'sLeft?Womenin Cultureand the LabourMovement(London: Routledge, 1990).

4.

Quintin Hoare, "On Women: 'The Longest Revolution,"' New LeftReview41 (1967), p. 80.

5.

Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysisand Feminism(Harmondsworth, England: Allan Lane and Penguin Press, 1974).

Theory as an Object

29

object was that unless one has access to the clinical experience from which that object. theory arises, one is reduced to dealing with a static, unchangeable Without an underlying practice that is always changing, how can one do more than either question the theory within its own terms or apply it as it stands to the art under consideration?

My use of Winnicott's article is by way of a self-reproach to this simplistic first reaction-a reaction also born of irritation with the often unwarranted of the superiority postulates of cultural studies. It is also by way of a small criof the tique prevalence today of so-called relational analysis, particularly in the United States. Winnicott writes, "I propose to put forward for discussion the idea of the use of an object. The allied subject of relating to objects seems to me to have had our full attention."6 My framework is implicit in Winnicott's-I am interested in the difference between "use," "relating" (which includes interhistory, or relating), and "identification." When does another discipline-art, the for with "relate," or "identify" instance-"use," theory literary criticism, that is its object?

What prompts Winnicott's thought is a widespread clinical phenomenonthe overcoming of which I would consider to be central to the distinction between full-blown psychoanalysis and psychoanalytical therapy. In this all-too-frequent conclusion to a treatment, analyst and analysand collude to avoid an underlying psychosis or madness by finding a psychoneurotic resolution.

In such cases the psychoanalyst may collude for years with the patient's need to be psychoneurotic (as opposed to mad) and to be treated as psychoneurotic. The analysis goes well, and everyone is pleased. The only drawback is that the analysis never ends. It can be terminated, and the patient may even mobilize a psychoneurotic false self for the purpose of finishing and expressing gratitude. But, in fact, the patient knows that there has been no change in the underlying (psychotic) state and that the analyst and the patient have succeeded in colluding to bring about a failure.... Although we write papers about these borderline cases we are inwardly troubled when the madness that is there remains undiscovered and unmet.7 Despite appearances, the patient has been engaged in a self-analysis feeding off only his own thoughts and has been unable to use the analyst. By and large, they cannot necespeople can use food or use the teaching they are offered-but use the The for not includes Winnicott, sarily only the person of analyst. analyst, the analyst, but also the analytic technique and the analytic setting. Although his own work is dedicated to not producing metapsychologies, had someone pointed it out to him, I believe Winnicott would have been prepared to add the analytic 6.

7.

Winnicott, "The Use of an Object and Relating through Identification," p. 86.

Ibid., p. 87.

OCTOBER

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"theory" to his triad of setting, technique, and person. For Winnicott is often confounded by his own simplicity. Nearly halfway through this paper he writes, "I am now ready to go straight to the statement of my thesis. It seems I am afraid to get there, as if I fear that once the thesis is stated the purpose of my communication is at an end, because it is so very simple."8 When Wilfred Bion formulated his complex concept of the mother-infant interaction in the formation of thinking, Winnicott commented that if Bion wanted to express his observations in that complex way, so be it, but it was what he, Winnicott, had been saying very simply while not being understood for years by the Kleinian group to which Bion belonged. My own explanation is that Winnicott's simplicity is often harder to hold on to than Bion's complexity because Winnicott turns the obvious on its head-making it just the obvious upside down. But the obvious upside-down makes one see differently. The argument we are considering here is a case in point.

The person, the technique, the setting, and the theory are then the "analytic object." But, of course, behind this amalgam lies another: the person of the mother, her technique, her setting, and the theory that she represents and in which she is embedded. The transference of this primary infantile constellation to the clinical conditions cannot, I believe, be ignored when the destination is instead the academy and its wider intellectual context. (I do not have the opportunity here to consider the implications of the time and conditions when this transference, which in fact is not of the mother but of the parents, was of the Oedipal father rather than the pre-Oedipal mother.)

Winnicott tends to move effortlessly between the original figure and its repetition in the analyst; for him, there is the mother and her reincarnation in the figure and context of the analyst. I want to try and not move between them, but to hold them in a tension of coexistence. The artist and the critic, like the patient, experience the object-that is to say, the original mother and her theory and, in our focus here, psychoanalytic theory-not as separate points but simultaneously.

Imitating Winnicott's own delay, it has taken me some time to get to the central point-the point of reversal, the turning upside down of our understanding.

It is this: the usual explanation of human destructiveness is that it is either innate (Klein) or alternatively that it is in response to, or triggered by, a violence experienced by the subject from the external world. However, what Winnicott suggests is that it is destructiveness that creates the external world as external. His question is not, What is destructiveness? but, What does it do? He argues from observation that if we are to develop the capacity to use an object, we must first destroy it. We can only use it once we are not totally identified with it, or even in a state of relationship or interrelationship with it. What we are therefore destroying is the object who is us, or is related to us: I try to kill the theory that is the same or 8.

Ibid., p. 89.

Theory as an Object

31

i ri i

'WI

".4.'A

f

^

ShellburneThurber.

West Newton, Mass.: Office with brown couch and abstract ceramic wall piece. 2000.

Courtesythe artist.

32

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nearly the same as me. If I am lucky, the theory is strong enough to withstand my assaults and will still be there for me to love and appreciate when my destructiveness is (temporarily) over. But the main point is that though the theory may be, to all extents and purposes, the same before and after my attempted destruction of it, when it survives it will be in a different place. It will be other than me, an external object, which it always was-but not to me before I tried with all my worth to destroy it, and it still survived.

I want to argue, as Winnicott did not, that there is also a destructiveness that comes through an identification with an external trauma and that this, if it is too powerful, prohibits the development of the courage to destroy the object in the necessary way Winnicott described. Why, I want to ask, is the patient who cannot destroy and hence use his object so afraid of madness? I shall explore Winnicott's suggestion and its further implication for our topic.

The world is already there for all of us, but we-baby, patient, artist, or critic-first believe we have created it. Such a belief persists even if most of us try not to acknowledge it. I remember my own elderly mother, when she lived by the sea and I visited her, exclaiming in an ecstasy of joy at the sunlight and the waves: "I made this." Such a statement was, of course, both absolutely mad and completely right-she had done nothing of the sort, and, at the same time, she had created it as a shared reality, as a series of interrelationships: she, my mother who had "created" me, could share the world that had also "made" us both. It is this shared reality I want to emphasize. It is not Winnicott's focus, and my suggestion that this shared reality heralds the use of an object differs somewhat from his. I do not believe that, when my mother went on the solitary walks along the beach that she loved, she believed she had made the world. The important point for me is that the world that was and is (we hope) always there, becomes shared. "Sharing" and "relating" are words to which we give a positive valence, but I want to renounce such connotations here. In this mad moment of believing one creates it, a moment not of object use but of object relating, there is ecstasy, the ecstasy of a moment of creation, an ecstasy that has to pass, for otherwise it can only be sustained in the isolation of mania or in the endlessness of some analytical treatments in which the patient has identified with the process but not used the analyst/setting/technique and theory.

What we have here is a particular type of sharing that can be witnessed in the need for the analyst to collude in a failure of the analysis. The analyst created the patient, and the wonderful theory of psychoanalysis made them both. Analyst and patient in this scenario thus stand in a relationship of "simple equation" to each other. It is not, I believe, as Winnicott (here relating too deferentially to Klein in order to disagree with her) argues, a matter of projection entirely. There is an ecstatic, primitive sharing. As an artist, that ecstatic moment may happen when one is actually alone, but the experience is internally peopled-someone, some audience who is the same as oneself as created object, is there in the sensation of excitement, in this jouissance.

Theory as an Object

33

From this ecstasy of object-relating, however, the move that is often not made, or not sufficiently made, is to object use. For this, Winnicott stresses, the environmother-is ment needs to be such that the subject-baby/patient/artist/critic/my to The a to use the psychoanalytic theory-here helped capacity object. develop theory-has to be good enough to help those who would use it to develop the capacity to do so through first allowing their destructiveness. Here I would separate out Winnicott's concepts "environments" (as in his notion of the "facilitating environment") and "object." Empirically, the environment is an "object," and the object is is different to be part of the environment, but as concepts they are not identical-it one's environment and to take one's environment as an object-say of love or hate.

The good-enough theory helps the person who would use it to do so, to turn it from environment, from the context that helps, into an object that can be used. So the ideas of psychoanalysis form an environment, a context. If they are related to, they remain thus; if they are destroyed, they can be used as an object.

From the other perspective, that of the subject, this shift, according to is one the most of Winnicott, important and most difficult in human development. From the side of the subject, the subject needs to destroy the object in order to make the object into the external object it already is in itself, but is not yet for the subject.

Before looking at both the capacity to destroy and the act of destruction, I want to gloss Winnicott's account. The artist or critic is helped by the theory of psychoanalysis to develop the capacity to destroy that theory so that she or he can make use of it as a theory independent of the artist/critic. It may help to formulate this so that psychoanalysis, while still an environmental object to which the artist/critic relates in the ecstasy of a shared relationship (or in Winnicott's terms, into which she/he projects her/his own feelings), can become, through its but instead a use-object. What is destruction, no longer an environment-object, the artist/critic doing when she/he destroys the environment-object or, very woras though to relate instead when continues avoids so and she/he ryingly, doing the limitations are user had What and its should-be the same theory experience? of relating? Why does relating to theory not move to using it-what is the fear of madness that is being avoided?

My mother's joy in her creation of the environment-object took only superficial account of my own or the object-environment's reality. There are other in but not own The with their sharing the language of the people, reality. patient, not the the has own artist/critic relating to psyanalyst, analyst's reality; grasped its very different reality in its not seen choanalytic theory, speaking language, has that from her or his own. This, to me, is not projection: it is an identification denies any differentiation, even that differentiation made by the marker of identification itself. creates not a new object but the subDestroying the environment-object ject's ability to use it. Psychoanalytic theory does not change from within itself, but it looks and behaves differently because the artist/critic can use it; the used

OCTOBER

34

analyst/mother is not in herself different from the one that facilitated the baby/patient's capacity to use her-but she looks and behaves differently, so one can say "good-bye,"knowing one does not know everything about her but taking with one all that she continues to mean beyond even the parting of the death that in time must happen.

Does this mean that the artist/critic has to leave psychoanalytic theory in order to live her or his own creative life? To think about that question, we need to turn to the key action in creating the theory as object to be used-the moment (or rather many moments throughout a lifetime) of destruction. Winnicott was an ardent opponent of Freud's hypothesis of a death drive; in fact I believe his repudiation of it was emotionally driven by a hatred of Melanie Klein's rendition of the death drive as primary envy and innate destructiveness. Freud's death drive is a deathliness that drives the subject back to a quasi-inorganic state of stasis-by the time it is destructiveness and aggression, it has fused with that other equally great force, the life drive. In fact, Winnicott's "destruction" of the object could be one empirical reading of this latter effect: it is a loving destructiveness, or, as he puts it, a destructiveness without anger.

First, what does the environment-object do to facilitate the subject so that she/he can destroy? The analyst in this phase of the patient's development makes sparse interpretations, and these are made only to indicate the limits of the analyst's own understanding of the patient, the mother's of the baby, the psychoanalytic theory's of the work of art and/or its creator. Primary maternal preoccupation needs a mother not to have boundaries that separate her from her baby-and without boundaries she is necessarily mad. However, the mother withdraws from her mad sharing with the baby, in which it is as though they were having the same experience: all babies are the same-the same stomach cramps, the same milky pleasures. The theory withdrawsfrom thinking it can understand all creativity;it respects that every artist/art object has a different take on the same human experience. Conversely,the same setting, same technique, same theory, same analyst, same mother are not entirely the same for each patient/baby. What is destroyed is what, many years ago, writing from a very different place, I called "identicality":when the sun shines, I am not necessarily shining too.

It will be seen that, although destruction is the word I am using, the actual destruction remains potential. The word "destruction" is needed, not because of the baby's impulse to destroy, but because of the object's liability not to survive, which also means to suffer change in quality, in attitude.9 The theory is vulnerable. Like the mother, it may not survive. However, theory and mother, I would argue, have first to withdraw their identification with the artist and baby. The mother does not feel and understand the baby's pain for 9.

Ibid., p. 93.

Theory as an Object

35

all time; the psychoanalytic theory may have a model of art, but it may not grasp what stirs this aspect of this artist. This is what Winnicott describes as the analyst's allowing the patient to know the limits of the analyst's understanding. If the analyst shows her limitations, the patient can recognize these and use different aspects of her. So, too, the artist and the theory. For example, I got a shock when I first opened American critic Barbara Johnson's 1998 The Feminist Difference:for each work of fiction that she was analyzing, she had used an often substantially different branch of psychoanalytic theory.10 But, in fact, treating the theories as different manifestations of the same human/theoretical thing (the unconscious, psychosexuality, death) was very enriching. "Mymother treats my brother differently from me" can-admittedly with difficulty-be a deeply rewarding experience, particularly as it is rarely the whole truth. The point is not any preference but that she and each of us are different; the world is a various place.

Psychoanalytic theory, despite a new surge to the recurrent clarion call of its demise, has so far survived; survived not only those who hope it will not do so, but also those who start by relating to it. If she/he is not to stay relating but move to using, this will happen: The subject says to the object: "I destroyed you," and the object is there to receive the communication. From now on the subject says: "Hullo object!" "I destroyed you." "I love you." ... "While I am loving you I am all the time destroying you in (unconscious) fantasy."1 And conversely the mother/analyst must know when the baby is able also to be destroyed as an environment object and used as a different child. This recurrent moment of destruction-and-survival is the moment of the birth of fantasy. In other terms, imagination can take over from hallucination; perception and the "I" starts here.

The neonate can see well for a few days after birth, then less well, and finally well again. Is this a precursor of primary relating/primary identification (baby in its environment, which it sees well); destructiveness (baby destroys environment-object, which it no longer sees so well); use of the object/perception (environment survives and becomes an object to be seen/used by the eyes)? We know that in groups, or in mass action, each individual subject regresses from perception to identification so that all act as one. I would suggest that the movement is from the underlying progression away from identicality, via destructiveness, to perception and then a regression back again. Art-and not criticism or analysis-can take either route: regression to being the same as the theory, or using and perceiving the theory from different it, like the only then-will points of view. If the theory is used, then-and 10.

Barbara Johnson, The FeministDifference:Literature,Psychoanalysis,Race, and Gender(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).

11.

Winnicott, "The Use of an Object and Relating through Identification," p. 90.

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mother/analyst, contribute to what the subject is doing: "the object develops its own autonomy and life, and (if it survives) contributes-in to the subject, according to its own properties."12 The notion of the destruction of the theory should not be etiolated to some benign notion of play. It may be without anger, but nevertheless there is, and has to be, a real risk, which is often realized, that the object will not survive, that it cannot change. It is not only the object's strength, its ability to survive because fundamentally it is a good theory, or "good enough" theory, that is at stake in the nature of the subject's destructiveness. The exceptional artist takes more-thanof the object, not average risks; chances the possibility of the nonsurvival in but too in which the artist when it is late.

Art time, withdrawing just possibly nearly is the same as his/her creation is object relating; art that withdraws, fearing that its destructiveness will kill the object, stops short of greatness.

Earlier, I mentioned one line of my own relationship to psychoanalysis: it was in realizing how the family in which the woman was inserted and lost bore the mark of sexual difference; we bear kinship with us wherever we go. It is not the only scenario. I met the artist Mary Kelly in a Women's Liberation group not very long after 1969. I still feel the construction of Post-Partum Document as though it were born from all our bodies at that time, much as my own Psychoanalysis and Feminism sprang Athena-like from all our heads. It was a period of profound collectivity.

Mary has moved on from Post-Partum Document-I myself from Psychoanalysis and Feminism.'3 I hope we have been destructive of psychoanalytic theory (though I know I have very often only related to it); it has obviously survived our, and other, more powerful attacks not only in the generic sense that it is bigger and stronger than we are. It has survived in the sense that matters: its survival can only be assured by the fact that it has changed, though certainly not utterly. Whoever uses it and does not regress to relating to it, be they clinician, artist, critic, historian, or patient, will help it change and thus survive, or survive and thus change and, in turn, will bear its contribution in themselves and in their work.

Now an illustration: Mrs. A came to see Mrs. B, a therapist, for a limited period of time. Mrs. A set this time limit for perfectly good external reasons.

However, it soon became clear that she did not believe Mrs. B (or anyone) could take very much of her. During her therapy, she moved into Mrs. B's neighborhood, and in her strictly self-timed sessions she occupied the consulting room as though it were her own home. She said whatever came into her head with apparently no resistance or censorship whatsoever. She did not like any interruption to the ceaseless flow of her talking. Her body was as uninhibited as her mind.

Sometimes she brought Mrs. B the accomplished paintings in which she portrayed her sense of despair.

Winnicott starts his reflections with the clinical observation that a treatment can end with a collusion between the therapist and patient such that they Ibid.

12.

13.

Mary Kelly appeared on a panel with Juliet Mitchell at the symposium for which this paper was written.-Ed.

Theory as an Object

37

have managed a neurosis and avoided a psychosis. The mechanisms of projection to which he refers when describing the "relating" to the object condition confirm his statement that it is a psychosis that is missed. I want, however, to call it madness-the madness that Andre Green wishes to reinstate when he describes passions and their vicissitudes; the madness that Winnicott finds necessary in the mother whose "primary maternal preoccupation" allows her to be at one with her baby.

In fearing that Mrs. B could only stand her for a precise fifty-minute session for a fixed period, Mrs. A was referring to her madness-which was real enough: it was an ecstatic at-oneness of art work and artist, not a projection but a relating without boundaries of you and me, self and other. Patient and analyst will certainly collude consciously to avoid this ecstasy of madness, this folie hysterique, to end the analysis before it has begun. But the irony is that this collusion achieves exactly what it aims to avoid: the folie, the ecstasy, the relating that is preserved within the confines of a termination of an analysis that has not happened; an analyst who has not been used and therefore has not "contributed-in" to the patient. Mrs. A's initial self-restrictions on the amount of time she gave herself were masked by an identification with the analysis. She allowed herself the same fifty-minute sessions that the process allowed her: she and it were to be one and the same thing. One day it would have to terminate before it had started, so this, too, she identified with/related to from the outset. This "mad" solution was agreed to because the fifty-minute sessions, the termination, were what the psychoanalytic theory offered. Although Mrs. B was aware of this and of the implications of the predetermined termination, the very expression of the problem "tied her hands" as an analyst: she did not have time to deal with the issue. Another patient followed Mrs. A's session; Mrs. A had to return on a fixed date to her own country.

It looked as though the analyst did not have time in the future, but the issue, in was that Mrs. B did not have time in thepast. The lack of time instigated by Mrs. fact, A was a communication not that there wouldnot be time but that there had not been time. This was not just a complaint in the transference about a mother who had not had enough time for her baby, but a message about a baby and mother actually not being there for each other: it was this that was to be reenacted. Mrs. A was unconsciously warning Mrs. B that she was to be an adoptive mother, who could not know Mrs. A from birth. This had not been literally the case, but it was a powerful fantasy that Mrs. A lived by for reasons beyond the scope of this essay.What Winnicott's distinction between relating and use enables us to see is that although relatingdemands a presence that is actually there for the one who relates, use transforms this into a knowledge that it may not be there for the user, but that it exists anyway.

What is important is that an adoptive mother can know a baby from birth or conception, and a birth mother may well not. The former will have been used, the latter not. The same is true of a theory. The use of psychoanalytic theory by nonclinicians is an adoptive use, as was mine in Psychoanalysisand Feminism,where I

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wanted to use psychoanalysis to understand something about sexual difference.

Thus, Winnicott's brief but important paper has enabled me to flesh out my selfreproach that to change a theory one must have access to the material from which it arose. But it has done more than this; it has helped me reflect on a distinction between the art of an artist who is identified with his product and one who sees it as an object external to its creator because she has risked destroying it.

On the Couch*

MIGNON NIXON

The setting is like the darkness in a cinema, like the silence in a concert hall.

-Federico

Flegenheimer

There is a scene in Nanni Moretti's film The Son's Room (2001) in which a prospective patient, a middle-aged man making his first visit to a psychoanalyst, pauses upon entering the consulting room to examine the couch. It is a fine couch, he remarks, "simple, comfortable, even elegant in its way.... But I have no intention of lying on it."

Still, the analyst's marine-blue couch receives many visitors over the course of the film. One woman spends the hour calculating her losses. How much does the analyst really understand-20 percent of what she is saying, or 30? There have been 460 sessions, she chides, and after every one, to assuage her disappointment, she shops. A male patient gushes dreams. They pour from him in unbroken succession, filling the analytic hour like water flowing noisily into a bath. A woman suffers from obsessional thoughts. Her time on the couch is measured as metronomically as her daily routine, in a recitation of the rituals that mete out her hours. The analyst'sthoughts drift across to the cupboard where he stores a private collection of objects, a treasury not of antique figurines such as Freud favored, but an extensive array of running shoes-fetishes not of Eros but of Nike-stacked in precisely ordered rows.

While the patients talk, the tall, bearded analyst, his long limbs folded into an armchair classically positioned behind the couch, smiles, sighs, takes notes, drops and lifts his eyes, flexes his fingers, makes the occasional tactful observation, but mostly abides. In one session, he mentally counts the seconds until the patient departs. For these visitors are sufferers in need of his help, but also intruders, * I wish to thankJudith Batalion and Uschi Payne for research assistance with this article and the Research Committee of the Courtauld Institute of Art for research support.

OCTOBER113, Summer2005, pp. 39-76. ? 2005 MignonNixon.

40

OCTOBER

whiners, time wasters, and bullies. He needs his space. At the end of the day, Giovanni Sermonti closes the doors of his office and, in unmistakable emulation of Freud at Berggasse 19, in turn-of-the-century Vienna, enters the adjoining rooms, the scene of his apparently contented bourgeois life.

Then, one Sunday morning, amiable Oscar, the dream gusher (whose stream of consciousness, however, is punctuated by fleeting fantasies of suicide), telephones in a state of distress. It is a blow for the analyst, who has just persuaded his son to join him for a run. The moody adolescent boy has been much on his mind. But Oscar persists, and the analyst finally agrees to meet him. He drives to the countryside, where he finds Oscar padding disconsolately about his untidy house, crumpled by the discovery of a spot on his lung. Returning to town that afternoon, the analyst learns that his son has been killed in a diving accident. Now he can no longer endure the talk of the patients, their trivial worries, their inconsolable sadness, and, even worse, their joy. Tears flow as he struggles to listen from the lap of his chair. As for Oscar, whose distress call took the analyst to the countryside while his son was dying in the sea, Giovanni cannot resist dashing the man's wishful fantasies, blotting his hope. Yet the cancer has deepened the patient's insight; it may be his cure. At last, Oscar breaks off the analysis. Soon Giovanni expels all the patients from his life.

He closes his practice and asks his patients to leave him alone.

Imagine you are lying on Freud's couch. What can you see?

John Forrester From my reclining yet propped-up,somewhatMadame RIcamier-likeposition on the couch, Iface the wide-opendouble door At thefoot of the couch is the stove. Placed next [to] the stove is the cabinet that contains the more delicate glass jars and the variously shaped bottlesand Aegean vases. In the wall space, on the otherside of the double door,is another case or cabinet of curiosities and antiques; on top of this case thereare busts of beardedfigures-Euripides? Socrates?Sophocles,certainly. Thereis the window now as you turn that corner at right angles to the cabinet, and then another case that contains potteryfigures and some more Greek-figurebowls. Then, the door to the waiting room. At right angles again, there is the door that leads through the laboratory-likecupboardroomor alcove, to the hall.

-H. D. Freud's original conception of the psychoanalytic setting is commemorated in two museums, one at Berggasse 19 in Vienna, where he lived and practiced medicine and then psychoanalysis from 1891 to 1938, and another in Hampstead, north London, in the house where he took refuge at the end of his life, and to which his extensive collection of antiquities, his library, and his couch were spirited through the intercession of well-placed friends. For some forty years after Freud's death in 1939, his psychoanalyst daughter, Anna Freud, continued to live and work in the

On the Couch

41

f fI !te

)-

I 0?

_?-: ~T4~'~'m"~

~'""~Freud's

couch, 1938.

Photo:EdmundEngelman.

house at 20 Maresfield Gardens, preserving Freud's rooms exactly as he had left them, as if in anticipation of the moment when, upon her own death in 1982, the house would be officially converted into a museum, or, as John Forrester has observed, "a museum within a museum: a museum of precious ancient objects, within an ordinary house in Hampstead where a great man died."l London's Vienna counterpart opened earlier, in 1971, with no collection to display. Here there are no antique statuettes, no vases, no bowls, no books, and no furnishings beyond the waiting-room chairs and a few minor items that Anna Freud, already planning the museum in London, would subsequently deliver into the empty hands of the Sigmund Freud Society of Vienna. In contrast to the diorama of discipleship in London, the centerpiece of Vienna's museum, with its bare walls and uncarpeted floors, is a panoramic display of life-sized photographs of Freud's consulting room and study. These pictures, which were taken on the eve of the family's departure in 1938, stimulate a reflection on the historical forces that shaped psychoanalysis as a diasporic culture. As Forrester has written of his own visit to the museum in 1975: "It had a derisible atmosphere, perhaps one deliberately induced to remind visitors of 1.

John Forrester, "Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist," in Dispatchesfrom the Freud Wars:Psychoanalysis and Its Passions (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 132.

42

OCTOBER

yet one more loss that the war had visited on Vienna; but it still prompted the screen museum, thought that a museum of fake souvenirs is a fake museum-a the Freudian might say."2 The photographic history of the psychoanalytic consulting room begins with Edmund Engelman, summoned to Berggasse 19 a young engineer-photographer,

by August Aichorn in May 1938. Working in secret and using only natural light for fear of alerting the Gestapo, Engelman produced some 150 negatives, including a record of Freud's consulting room and study.3 At the complete photographic Freud Museum in Vienna, the enlarged photographs wrap around the walls at wainscot level so that the visitor entering the consulting room will be facing the carpet-draped couch and Freud's chair tucked discreetly behind it. In her psychoanalytic memoir, H. D., one of Freud's more devoted analysands and a devotee also of the couch, leads us ceremoniously to the scene. After passing up a curved stone staircase to a landing, and being ushered in through the door to the right (the one to the left leads to the family apartment); after possibly meeting the previous patient on the stairs; after crossing the carpeted waiting room and depositing one's coat on one of the pegs in a narrow corridor reminiscent of a laboratory or school; after being invited into the consulting room itself, beyond which lies the book-lined study filled with antiquities; after tracing this path, one will find "tucked into the corner, in the three-sided niche made by the two walls and the back of the couch," the Professor. "He will sit there quietly, like an old owl in a tree. He will say nothing at all or he will lean forward and talk about something Ibid.

2.

3.

Engelman left Germany for the United States in 1939. The negatives remained in London with Anna Freud. See Edmund Engelman, Berggasse19, SigmundFreud'sHome and Offices,Vienna 1938 (New York:Basic Books, 1976). For a systematic and illuminating analysisof Engelman's photographs, see Diana Fuss, "Freud'sEar: Berggasse 19, Vienna, Austria,"in TheSenseof an Interior:Four Writersand theRoomsThat ShapedThem(New York:Routledge, 2004), pp. 71-105.

Viewfrom the consulting room into the waiting room, taken from approximately the position of the couch, Freud Museum, Vienna.

Photo ? Gerald Zugmann/Vienna.

On the Couch

43

that is apparently unrelated to the progression or unfolding of our actual dreamcontent or thought association. He will shoot out an arm, sometimes somewhat alarmingly, to stress a point. Or he will, always making an 'occasion' of it, get up" and light a cigar.4 An early plan for the Vienna museum would have placed a replica couch and armchair, each in its assigned position, in an otherwise empty consulting room.5 supplemented by letters and By instead relying on photographic documentation, memorabilia arranged and numbered in shallow glass vitrines-by "eschewing reconstruction, which would suggest historical continuity,"6 in favor of an archival architects chose instead to present the history of Freudian psypresentation-the choanalysis through the medium of "a screen museum" (a "screen memory" being, in psychoanalytic terms, a false form of remembering that covers desire). At the Freud Museum in Hampstead, Forrester observes, the visitor encounters by contrast "a meticulously conserved milieu: the real furniture, the books, the little objects useful in everyday life and useless anywhere else," most notably the couch.7 Continuously on display at the Freud Museum in London since 1986, Freud's own couch, that sacred relic of psychoanalysis-that "flying carpet for unconscious lends voyaging," as Marina Warner describes it in the museum's guidebook-now itself to the scopophilic curiosity it was charged with frustrating in the treatment itself, in which the patient was prevented from observing the analyst.8 By Freud's H. D., "Writingon the Wall,"in TributetoFreud(1970; Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1985), p. 22.

4.

5.

Christian Huber, Freud Museum Library,Vienna, e-mail communication to the author, May 27, 2004.

6.

Lydia Marinelli and Georg Traska, "Besuch einer Wohnung: Zur Architectur des Sigmund Freud-Museums,"in ArchitekturdesSigmundFreud-Museums (Vienna: Freud Museum, 2002).

7.

Forrester, "Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist,"p. 132.

Marina Warner, Preface to 20 MaresfieldGardens:A Guide to the Freud Museum (London: Freud 8.

Museum, 1998), p. viii.

'teee-..,_ ii^

-

m4

I .

|

.~~~~~~~~~~~~~~I

Freud's couch and desk, Freud Museum, London.

44

OCTOBER

own account, the couch had "a historical basis,"being "the remnant of the hypnotic method out of which psychoanalysis was evolved."9The couch was apparently the gift of a patient, one Mrs. Benvenisti, who presented it to her doctor in 1891.10 In his 1913 essay "On Beginning the Treatment," following a detailed discussion of what he deemed the crucial factors for initiating analysis-"arrangements about time and money"-Freud offers "a word about a certain ceremonial," the relative positions of analyst and analysand, in which the patient lies on the couch while the analyst sits behind her or him and out of sight.11 The first consideration is "a personal motive"-"I cannot put up with being stared at by other people." Second, "since while I am listening to the patient, I, too, give myself over to the current of my unconscious thoughts," Freud observes, there is a danger that the analyst will be interfered with in this process by the patient, who may also be influenced by the other's facial expressions. Freud's brief note concludes: "The patient usually regards being made to adopt this position as a hardship and rebels against it, especially if the instinct for looking (scopophilia) plays an important role in his neurosis."12And this may perhaps go some way toward explaining the notable fact that the cultural and phantasmatic history of the psychoanalytic scene, the setting or frame, has been constructed preeminently in the privileged arena of modern scopophilia and voyeuristic desire-in cinema.

Freud himself rejected such "plastic representation" of psychoanalysis, at least on the one occasion when the idea was put to him.13 That was in the summer of 1925, when Karl Abraham, founder of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, relayed a proposal from Hans Neumann, an independent filmmaker in Berlin, for an "educational film" about psychoanalysis.14Abraham described the project as a "popular, scientific, psychoanalytic" film, to be based on an actual clinical case. A short treatise on psychoanalysis was to be provided to the audience "like an opera libretto."15Freud demurred. "Mychief objection," he wrote Abraham, "is ... that I do not believe that satisfactory plastic representation of our abstraction is at all possible" (this film about the talking cure would be silent).16 Abraham died of a sudden illness in December, the break with Freud unmended, but not before he and another of Freud's disciples, Hans Sachs, had seen the project through to filming. Taken over by the German UFA film company, Neumann's Lehrfilm (a

9.

Sigmund Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psychoanalysis I)," in The StandardEdition of the CompletePsychologicalWorksof SigmundFreud,vol. 12, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1958), p. 133.

A Guideto theFreudMuseum,p. 54.

10.

11.

Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment," pp. 126, 133.

12.

Ibid., p. 134.

13.

Sanford Gifford, "Freud at the Movies, 1907-1925: From the Piazza Colonna and Hammerstein's Roofgarden to The Secretsof a Soul,"in CelluloidCouches,CinematicClients:Psychoanalysisand Psychotherapy in theMovies,ed. Jerrold R. Brandell (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 147.

14.

Hans Neumann to Karl Abraham, quoted in ibid., p. 151.

15.

Karl Abraham to Freud, June 7, 1925, quoted in ibid., p. 151.

16.

Freud, quoted in ibid., p. 152.

On the Couch

45

iR~~~v~~~ i?--~~~~

~

G. W.Pabst.From Secrets of a Soul.

1925. Rights: Friedrich-WilhelmMurnau-Stiftung.

Distributor:Transit Film GmbH.

genre of the time, with others being produced on subjects including gynecology) became the commercial offering Secretsof a Soul, directed by G. W. Pabst and featuring Werner Krauss and Pawel Pawlow as patient and psychoanalyst.

The consulting room in which the treatment unfolds is a capacious salon richly appointed with flowered carpet, heavy draperies, lace curtains, and a wide couch that thrusts diagonally into the room, facing away from a bank of windows against which the analyst is seated. The case concerns a chemist whose symptoms include a knife phobia and fantasies of killing his wife, with whom he is impotent. The treatment begins with the two men facing each other across a low table, but the patient soon transfers to the couch. Dwarfed by its great size, he rolls around, tormented by the memory of violent dreams, at times adopting a quasi-fetal position and frequently turning to face the analyst, who answers these signs of distress by reaching over to pat the younger man gently on the arm, gestures charged with the affective resonance of speech in the talking cure. In the absence of sound, the spatial setting assumes an exaggerated significance, posing a question that remains largely unspoken in the literature of psychoanalysis: "What state does lying on a couch induce?"17 17.

Steven J. Ellman, Freud's TechniquePapers: A ContemporaryPerspective(Northvale, NJ.: Jason Aronson, Inc., 1991), p. 204. As Ellman is one of the few analytic practitioners to write on the use of the couch, it is worth quoting him more fully: "From my perspective, the important question is whether or not lying on the couch more easily induces a state that is difficult to replicate while sitting up or being in any other position in an analytic office. One might then ask what state does lying on a couch induce? The answer to this question is crucial, if one maintains that lying on a couch is a necessary condition for an analysis. The alternative to this position would profess that complying with the analyst's conditions is a necessary condition for analyzability. This is an untenable position if one also wants to provide a condition in which the patient is able to freely say what is on his mind."

OCTOBER

46

Points of importance at the beginning of the analysis are arrangements about time and money.

-Sigmund

Freud

The psychoanalytic couch is an icon of modern culture. Yet "Freud hardly wrote anything on the subject after his original recommendations," notes the editor of a recent special issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry devoted to this neglected point of technique, the use of the analytic couch. This reticence on the part of the founder, the editor suggests, is enough to ensure that the couch is "a topic that is perhaps the least controversial in psychoanalysis." For even if "using the couch in psychoanalytic treatment constitutes the sine qua non of the whole enterprise," the editor observes, the clinical literature studiously avoids discussing it. Or rather, he contends, because the couch is the sine qua non of the whole enterprise, it must be taken for granted and ignored.18 "How droll," then, remarks another practitioner, "that one of psychoanalysis's two clinical fundamentals" (the other being free association) "should receive more attention as an icon than as a technical dimension."19 The scene of psychoanalysis is commonly referred to as the frame.20 The frame unites the time and space of psychoanalytic experience, regulating the the of and duration of the the sessions, consulting room arrangement frequency and its furnishings, and the postures of analyst and analysand. Deviations from the established pattern break the frame. A patient who misses appointments, neglects to pay the fee on time, or refuses to lie on the couch breaks the frame, as does an analyst who fails to keep to time, miscalculates the fee, or interrupts the session by answering the telephone, for example. Breaking the frame is seen to signal unconscious resistance to the analysis. And because resistance is valued in psychoanalysis as a part of the transference (or, in the case of the analyst, the countertransference), these minor actions assume a heightened significance. Transference-the displacement onto the analyst of emotions originally associated with central figures in the patient's life-is brought into focus by the frame.

Psychoanalysis, writes Jean Laplanche, "leads to the dissolution of all formations-psychical, egoic, ideological, symptomatic" but, crucially, also "offers the of a constancy presence, of a solicitude, the flexible but attentive constancy of a frame."21 The function of the frame is to contain. "It is because the principle of constancy, of homeostasis, of Bindung is maintained at the periphery, that analytic unbinding is possible."22 He compares the role of the frame to that of the ego in 18.

George Moraitis, "Prologue,"PsychoanalyticInquiry15, no. 3 (1995), p. 275.

Alvin Frank, "The Couch, Psychoanalytic Process, and Psychic Change: A Case Study," 19.

PsychoanalyticInquiry15, no. 3 (1995), p. 324.

See Luciana Nissim Momigliano, "The Analytic Setting: A Theme with Variations," in Continuity 20. and Change in Psychoanalysis:Lettersfrom Milan, trans. Philip P. Slotkin and Gina Danile (London: Karnac Books, 1992), p. 33.

21.

Jean Laplanche, "Transference: Its Provocation by the Analyst," in Essayson Otherness(London: Routledge, 1999), p. 227.

Ibid.

22.

On the Couch

47

dreaming. In its desire for sleep, the ego assumes a "peripheral place ... leaving the field open to the primary process."23Just as sleep is the medium of the dream, for Laplanche the frame supports the process of analysis.

Writing in the 1960s, the Argentine psychoanalystJose Bleger also proposed a distinction between the "process" of analysis and the frame, "made up of constants within whose bounds the process takes place."24 Bleger compared the frame to an institution. The analysand may experience a particularly strong transference to the frame itself, he points out, "instead of the therapist," and this may enable her or him to "share in the prestige of a great institution"-or, conversely, by negative transference, may lead the patient to disparage (or break) the frame.25 In much the same way that, for a student, the university setting itself may hold greater importance than the faculty or fellow students, an individual analysand may experience analysis primarily as an effect of the frame.26 For Bleger, the conventions that structure analysis and guarantee its constancy are institutional features. "A relationship which lasts for years, in which a set of norms and attitudes is kept up, is nothing less than a true definition of institution," he observes, concluding: "The psychoanalytic situation is an institution in itself, especially the frame."27 The institutional conventions of psychoanalysis-hours and fees, carpets and cushions, the chair and the couch-support the task of unbinding. That is, psychoanalysis is an institution paradoxically devoted to dissolution. Even the frame, Bleger maintains, must ultimately become an object of analysis, or unbinding, and "here we are likely to find the strongest resistance."28 For when the

Ibid.

23.

24.

Jose Bleger, "Psycho-Analysis of the Psycho-Analytic Frame," International Journal of PsychoAnalysis48 (1967), p. 511.

25.

Ibid., p. 514.

Donald Winnicott observed, "In some cases, it turns out in the end or even at the beginning 26. that the setting and the maintenance of the setting are as important as the way one deals with the material" (D. W. Winnicott, "The Importance of the Setting in Meeting Regression in Psychoanalysis," in PsychoanalyticExplorations,ed. Clare Winnicott, Ray Shepherd, and Madeleine Davis [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989], p. 96). Winnicott describes the setting as the "environmental provision" in the analysis, commenting that "the patient is not there to work with us except when we provide the conditions which are necessary" (p. 97). These conditions, he observes, vary from one patient to another, and the analyst may sometimes be unable to create, or sustain, the necessary environment. A patient may, for example, demand absolute constancy in the placement of objects in the room, or insist that the curtains be always drawn. Here is another scenario: Let me a take a very crude example. A patient of mine went to an analyst and very quickly she got confidence in him and therefore she began to cover herself over with a rug and lie curled up on the couch with nothing happening. The analyst said to her "Sit up! Look at me! Talk!You are not to lie like that doing nothing; nothing will happen!"

According to Winnicott, "the patient felt that this was a good thing for the analyst to do" since it was obvious by his response that he could not meet her needs. "She got up and talked and got on very well with the analyst on the basis of a mutual interest in modern art"-until another analyst could be found (p. 97).

27.

Bleger, "Psycho-Analysisof the Psycho-Analytic Frame," pp. 512, 514.

28.

Ibid., p. 517.

48

OCTOBER

analysis turns to the frame, it touches on the "catastrophic situation" of infantile vulnerability, the fear of change.29 "The analystmodifies the furniture of the consulting room, changes the couch, moves.... As is well known, in these circumstances very intense reactions can be noticed, which can be real, even if only temporary, psychotic episodes, as if the change that has taken place mobilizes very primitive anxieties, of a symbiotic type, that are normally contained by the familiar set up."30So writes Luciana Nissim Momigliano, the Milanese psychoanalystto whom Nanni Moretti refers his audience for a theoretical understanding of the proposition that, as Momigliano puts it, psychoanalysis is an encounter between "two people talking in a room."31 The strange dynamic between analyst and analysand, however, is also a ritual that unbalances social intercourse through a series of calculated discrepancies: one speaks while the other listens in silence; one reclines while the other sits upright; one is charged with the exercise of singular self-restraint,while the demand on the other is to speak as freely as possible. As Laplanche explains, the work of analysisdepends on this "essential dissymmetry in the relation" in order for the transference to develop and to evolve.32The distance rigorously maintained between analyst and analysand, the scopic and social estrangement of the two people talking in a room, and the admonition to avoid contact outside the ritual space all contribute to the atmosphere of an encounter Laplanche describes as enigmatic, as contracted in an observes Laplanche, "isa place for speech, "enigmatic dimension."33"Whatis offered," for free speech, but not, properly speaking, the place of an exchange."34Analysis offers a place for speech within the enigmatic dimension of the frame.

In a published discussion between Moretti and a group of analysts, one audience member objected that, "in Germany, psychoanalysts would not go to visit a patient on a Sunday" as Sermonti does in The Son's Room. To which the filmmaker testily replied, "Perhaps in another country an analyst would never go and visit his patient on a Sunday; instead, in Italy, in a film of mine, he would!"35This in turn prompted another panelist, the psychoanalyst Stefano Bolognini, to announce, in his closing remarks: "Ijust want to reassure our colleague who spoke earlier about the Italian analyst's methods of practice: yes, usually they are human and affective, but they do not go to the home of the patient!"36 To one rulepsychoanalysts don't pay housecalls-the analysts of Germany and Italy, if not the 29.

Ibid., p. 515.

30.

Momigliano, "The Analytic Setting," p. 59.

31.

Ibid.

32.

Laplanche, "Transference,"p. 228.

33.

Ibid.

34.

Ibid., pp. 228-29.

35.

Nanni Moretti, Paola Golinelli, Stefano Bolognini, and Andrea Sabbadini, "Sons and Fathers: A Room of Their Own, Nanni Moretti's The Son's Room (2001)," in The Couch and the Silver Screen: PsychoanalyticReflectionson European Cinema, vol. 44 of The New Libraryof Psychoanalysis,ed. Andrea Sabbadini (Hove, U.K.: Brunner-Routledge, 2003), p. 69.

36.

Bolognini, quoted in ibid., p. 72.

On the Couch

49

filmmakers, apparently can agree, but the century-long debate over the proper distance between analyst and analysand, or the institutional limits of the frame, is not yet at an end.

Films about psychoanalysis routinely deviate from the rules, breaking the frame so as to motivate the plot. Moretti, however, is insistent about his fidelity to the analytic situation. "I wanted to respect the setting," he remarks. "I wanted the analyst's work to be carried out in his consulting room." While an American screenwriter might, Moretti claims, "tend to feel that this might be a boring thing to represent... I wanted my film, the work in my film, to be carried out within those walls, within the consulting room."37Turning to a leading theoretical voice on the setting, he mentions the work of Momigliano, who contrasts the rigid adherence to orthodoxy in psychoanalysis in America to analysis in Europe. In the "hyper-rigid technique" once "popular in the United States," she observes, "the principle of abstinence becomes the 'rule' of abstinence; in an effort to follow the rules of impersonality and anonymity, consulting rooms were left bare, so that none of the analyst's personality

or taste could be seen."38 In America, it seems,

filmmakers find the setting boring, and analysts make it so.

Such asceticism is contrary to Freud's own invention, the consulting room as a repository of past civilizations embodied in the serried rows of so many statuettes, figured vases, reliefs, textiles, and objets d'art of every description. For Freud, as Forrester has observed, the very model of psychoanalysis is collecting: "Freud opened up a whole set of related fields of phenomena, whose scientific study would require assiduous and painstaking collections: dreams, jokes, parapraxes, early memories."39And it is "alongside these distinctively Freudian collections," he observes, "that we should place his contemporaneous collection of antiquities," a treasury displayed exclusively in the consulting room and study as one index of "its intimate connection with his psychoanalytic work."40 Freudian psychoanalytic technique, however, did demand a renunciation of visual contact between analyst and analysand, effecting a displacement of scopic desire from the face of the analyst to the milieu of analysis. Freud recommended that the two people talking in a room look away from each other, the analyst seated behind and at right angles to the couch; and unlike H. D., who relished the view of Freud's collection (and claims to have impressed her analyst by inspecting first the room and only then turning her gaze to the doctor himself), some patients balk at the couch. "It'sa fine couch.... But I have no intention of lying on it," Giovanni's prospective patient assures him. "A particularly large number of patients ... ask to be allowed to go through the treatment in some other position," Freud acknowledged, "for the most part because they are anxious not to be 37.

Moretti, quoted in ibid., p. 65.

38.

Momigliano, "The Analytic Setting," p. 39. See also R. P. Fox, "The Principle of Abstinence 11 (1984), pp. 227-36.

Reconsidered," InternationalReviewof Psycho-Analysis 39.

Forrester, "Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist,"p. 118.

40.

Ibid., pp. 118, 116.

50

OCTOBER

deprived of a view of the doctor." He persevered. "I insist on this procedure," Freud explained, in order "to prevent the transference from mingling with the patient's associations imperceptibly, to isolate the transference and to allow it to come forward in due course sharply defined as a resistance."41 One function of the couch, therefore, is to keep analyst and analysand apart, to prevent them from becoming visually, or reflectively, entangled.

His original "recommendations on technique," Freud observed, "were essentially of a negative nature," cautioning the prospective analyst about "what one should not do"-above all, the analyst must not reciprocate the patient's demand for love-without requiring that the would-be analyst emulate Freud's clinical in technique every particular. As the culture of psychoanalysis calcified into the institution of psychoanalysis, however, "the docile analysts did not perceive the elasticity of the rules that I had laid down, and submitted to them as if they were taboos."42 In short, "the institutionalization of psychoanalysis," as Moustapha Safouan trenchantly observes, "was carried out as if psychoanalysis had never existed"-through repression.43 In repression, "the subject effaces her- or himself as a subject who knows what is going on."44 "Elided as the subject of her or his own utterance," the "docile" analyst is content to "present her- or himself purely as an interpreter of the Text," obedient to the word of Freud as to dogma. And "an institution founded on dogma," Safouan observes, "is repression personified."45For Momigliano, the hardening of the principle of abstinence into law, characterized by a clinical sterility in which the consulting room was left bare and the "analyst always wore the same clothes," amounts to a repression, an effacement of the analyst as a subject who is capable of responding creatively to the patient.46 So if, to extend Momigliano's suggestion, the frame of psychoanalysis is a symptom of the institution that underpins it-a repressive institution founded on dogma-a critique of the institution of psychoanalysis might begin in the consulting room itself.

41.

Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment," p. 134. Adam Phillips has remarked that "In the first psychoanalytic setting-the paradigm of every psychoanalytic consulting room-the patient could not see the analyst but could see his idols," his collection of figurines (Phillips, "Psychoanalysisand Idolatry," in On Kissing, Ticklingand Being Bored[London: Faber and Faber, 1993], p. 117).

Freud to Sandor Ferenczi, 1928, quoted in Momigliano, "The Analytic Setting," p. 37. Among 42. the not-so-docile were Ferenczi, who treated his more disturbed patients with marked affection; Melanie Klein, inventor of the psychoanalytic play technique; Donald Winnicott, author of the influential idea that the setting is "the summation of all the details of management"; andJacques Lacan, who experimented with variable lengths, including the short session, from which a patient might be dismissed after five minutes or sooner.

43.

Moustapha Safouan, JacquesLacan and the Question of PsychoanalyticTraining, trans. Jacqueline Rose (London: Macmillan, 2000), p. 63.

44.

Ibid., p. 67.

45.

Ibid., pp. 66-67. Or, as Adam Phillips observes, "the one thing psychoanalysis cannot cure, when it works, is belief in psychoanalysis. And that is a problem" (Phillips, "Psychoanalysis and Idolatry,"p. 130).

46.

Momigliano, "The Analytic Setting," p. 39.

51

On the Couch

The couch was slippery, the headpiece at the back was hard. I was almost too long; if I were a little longer myfeet would touch the old-fashioned porcelain stove that stood edge-wise in the corner... There was the stove, but there were moments when onefelt a little chilly. I smoothed thefolds of the rug, I glanced surreptitiously at my wristwatch.... I tucked my cold hands under the rug. I always found the rug carefullyfolded at the foot of the couch when I came in. Did the little maid Paula come in from the hall and fold the rug or did the preceding analysand fold it, as I always carefully did beforeleaving?

-H.

D.

Then there is the couch itself, which may be low, broad, comfortable, or quite the contrary; the chair of the analyst; the arrangement of the consulting room-shall it befurnished as a study or as a drawing room? Or shall it be left totally unfurnished apart from the couch and the chair?

-Alice and Michael Balint The room had the harsh and anguished modernity of the rooms in the paintings of Francis Bacon; in its motel-likedetachmentfrom the things of this world, it was like analytic abstinence itself. The couch was a narrowfoam-rubberslab coveredwith an indifferentlychosen gold fabric; over its foot, where the patient's shoes rested, a piece of ugly blackplastic sheeting was stretched.The room was like an iconoclast'sraised fist: this analyst's patients didn't come hereto pass the time of day, it toldyou.

-Janet Malcolm Dr. Schrift had two Utrillo prints and one Braque. (It was my first shrink, so I didn't realize these were the standard APA-approved prints.) He also had a Danish-modern desk (also APA-approved), and a brownish Foamland couch with a compulsive little plastic cover at thefoot and a hard wedge-shapedpillow, covered with a paper napkin, at the head.

-EricaJong In Buenos Aires in 1999, the Boston-based Shellburne photographer Thurber began a project to document psychoanalysts' offices. Returning to Boston the following year, she continued the series, photographing consulting rooms, studies, and waiting rooms. The photographs' subjects range from plush private suites to cluttered institutional cells. Most concentrate on the business end of the couch, showing the relative positions of the head of the sofa and the analyst's chair. On the evidence of this series at least, Freud's rug-draped convalescent bed, or its cousin, the vintage claw-foot fainting couch, continues to be used by some analysts. More often it is replaced by day beds, camp beds, cots, or even ordinary living room or bedroom furniture equipped with odd-sized pillows. Some analysts remain ensconced behind the couch, while others seem to have migrated into positions alongside the analysand, nestled noiselessly in

52

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deep, soft armchairs, keeping their feet raised on broad ottomans. Others sit upright in straight-backed chairs, swivel, or rock.

On the evidence of Thurber's photographs, overdetermination is the design strategy par excellence of the psychoanalytic consulting room. The walls are often lined with books, gaps opening to betray a little of the analyst's "personal taste." A scattering of rugs, busts, wall hangings, paintings, and, most common of all, prints (these last being mostly abstract compositions of the landscape-of-the-mind type) complete the look. Rows of figurines, strategically placed for optimal visibilityon a shallow shelf beside the couch, for example-pay tribute to Freud's own collection of antique statuettes. The founder's fascination with cultural syncretism also finds echoes in the selection of prominently displayed artifacts, a Native American wall hanging or an African mask. Less poetic symbols of contemporary culture occasionally infiltrate the scene. In one Buenos Aires office, a picture of Freud keeps company with a television set. Inside the door of a Framingham, Massachusetts, office, the corner is filled with file cabinets and an untidy stack of boxes containing, according to Thurber, prescription drugs.

Thurber's project began serendipitously in Buenos Aires when, as the houseguest of an elderly psychoanalyst, she was given the use of the consulting room one afternoon to read. "Struckby how intense and energetic" the analytic setting was, she asked to photograph it. The analyst "not only agreed but offered to contact her friends to see if they would like their offices photographed as well," and Thurber returned to Boston with a series of a dozen or so pictures. Continuing the project there, she traded on a prestigious fellowship to gain the entree granted more casually in Buenos Aires. "I encountered some resistance getting into the oldest and biggest institution, Boston Psychoanalytic," the artist recalls, but "I managed to break through, thanks to the Harvard letterhead."47Back home, Thurber assembled a more extensive series of some seventy-fiveconsulting-room pictures that testify to the significance, more specificallythe transferential significance, of the setting for the analyst.

"Having patients 'on the couch' may be a source of pride, supporting one's identity as an analyst,"one practitioner admits.48And if the presence of the couch itself stakes this claim to legitimacy, busts and images of Freud, a fixture of the rooms Thurber photographs, reinforce it. In one, a blue velvet couch, its soft lap spooned out by the settling-in of so many backsides, its creased, rumpled upholstery the proof of frequent and sustained use, is gently illuminated by a floor-length curtained window. Behind the couch is the analyst-not the occupant of this actual consulting room, but Freud. Or rather, sixteen Freuds, his bearded visage repeated in a multiple portrait arranged in a Warholesque grid of photographic portraits made at different moments in his life. The desire of the analyst to occupy the place of the master, 47.

Shellburne Thurber, conversation with the author, October 13, 2004. Some analysts from Boston Psychoanalytic were receptive and helped facilitate the project, she adds. The artist held a Bunting Institute fellowship from Radcliffe College at the time.

48.

Roy N. Aruffo, "The Couch: Reflections from an Interactional View of Analysis,"Psychoanalytic Inquiry15, no. 3 (1995), p. 370.

On the Couch

53

ShellburneThurber.Newtonville, Mass.: Blue couch with multiple portrait of Freud.

2000. Courtesythe artist.

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Safouan has noted, is the fantasy with which psychoanalysis as an institution has alwayshad to contend. From the outset (in Freud's own time), the institutionalization of psychoanalysiswas, writes Safouan, "apiece of acting out, a staging of desire at its most stubbornly resistant to signification: that is, of desire as essentially bound to (not to say effectively identical with) the defense which forbids each and every one of us from enjoying a certain quotient of pleasure held out or 'promised' by the place of the master."49The desire to occupy the place of the master is repressed, and with it theoretical curiosity about its surrounding space, which is the setting.

How, then, do we even know what contemporary psychoanalytic consulting rooms look like, apart from those we might pay to see? Turning from Thurber's photographs to the pages of a professional journal, InternationalPsychoanalysis,the bulletin of the International PsychoanalyticAssociation, we find it-confirmingJose Bleger's prescient observation that it is important "to consider the psychoanalytic situation as an institution in itself, especially the frame"-illustrated with a locally inflected global survey of analytic interiors. A Seattle consulting room is dominated by a Native American wall hanging, a patterned couch, and a geometric rug; in Hamburg, a parquet floor is warmed by a Turkish rug; in Paris, a Mies-type couch is illuminated by a wall of light-flooded windows. The June 2003 issue, however, also offers, on its Letters page, a comment from one analyst, Willem Linschoten, objecting to the disappearance of cartoons in favor of the waiting-room and consulting-room pictures. To illustrate his complaint, Linschoten provides a photographic caricature of his own "ivory tower" cell. A first attempt to produce this (digitally manipulated) image was, he reports, busy with the paraphernalia of the electronic office-computer equipment, cables, and adapters. "The first version of my 'room full of insight' was blurred with the seemingly useless trivia of our digital age."A second effort, cleared of this "abundant chaos," was instead "too sparse," an effect rectified by the "cunning placement" of a few objects: guitars propped in the corner, a "gaudy"abstract painting, a volume of Freud's Interpretationof Dreamson the analyst's chair, a female figure on a pedestal, a statuette of Michelangelo's Moses and a "coffee-table book," in the form of Edmund Engelman's 1976 monograph, Berggasse19 with Freud's picture emblazoned on its cover, and a framed diploma over the couch.50 The issue of International Psychoanalysisin which this parody of the frame appears, highlighting the analyst'sown transference to the couch, examines a "crisis in psychoanalysis."As measured by indices such as numbers of new patients and training candidates, psychoanalysis,it reports, is in decline. "The model of the typical analysis, handed down from generation to generation through the mythical image of the armchair and couch, is now restricted to the privileged," Elisabeth Roudinescou has observed in a recent manifesto for a "renewal of Freudianism."51 49.

Safouan, JacquesLacan and the Questionof PsychoanalyticTraining,p. 62.

50.

Willem Linschoten, "Letter,"InternationalPsychoanalysis12, no. 1 (June 2003), p. 4.

51.

Elisabeth Roudinescou, Why Psychoanalysis?, trans. Rachel Bowlby (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), pp. 140, 141.

On the Couch

55

Thurber.Brookline, Mass.: Office with Native American wall hanging.

2000. Courtesythe artist.

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"Soon psychoanalysis will only be of interest to an ever more restricted fringe of the population," Jean-Bertrand Pontalis has predicted, asking: "Will there only be psychoanalysts left on the psychoanalysts' couch?"52 In this light, the photographic portfolio of consulting rooms in InternationalPsychoanalysismight be seen as compensatory, securing the identity of the analyst as one who (still) has patients on the couch, even if they are only other analysts.53 Until recently even the clinical literature has been reticent on the matter of the frame. "I shall not waste many words on the question of the furnishing of the consulting room," remarks Henrik Carpelan-in an article entitled "On the Importance of the Setting in the Psychoanalytic Situation." The furnishing of the room, the author continues, "is decided by functional necessities, and the analyst's personal taste," as if neither factor was worth the trouble to explore in the kind of depth that is devoted to other elements of the frame, the timing and frequency of sessions, for example, or the length of the analysis-or payment. "The consulting room should not be an art museum or an exhibition hall," he advises. On the other hand, "this does not mean that it should necessarily be spartan and cold."

Above all, it should not elicit "excessive envy" from the analysand.54 The brittle tone of these recommendations persists when it comes to managing patients who sometimes "complain about the hardness of the couch, or the cushion being too high or too low, too hard or too soft," or about the upholstery being irritating or causing them to sweat. "Most of these complaints are accessible to analysis"meaning that they are transference responses that can be integrated into the analysis itself. Some patients, however, preferring "material well-being to psychic balance and internal satisfaction," present a "serious problem in this regard."55 Exasperation with patients who complain about the couch is a recurrent theme in the literature that touches on the topic, and is in marked contrast to analytic attitudes toward actions that break the frame in other ways. Even when patients use the couch uncomplainingly, the analyst may criticize the way this is done. One analysand of Carpelan, for example, "had the habit of moving the cushion and folding it double. He pretended it was more comfortable in this way.

Only after analyzing his narcissistic need of making the analysis on his own conditions was he able to leave the cushion as I had put it."56One is left to wonder whether the unstated demand to leave the cushion as the analyst has placed it is simply a matter of respecting the frame of the analysis, consistent with Freud's 52.

Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, quoted in ibid., p. 16.

53.

One contributor, Hamburg-based author and photographer Claudia Guderian, has recently published an illustrated book on the subject, trumpeted as the first global survey of the setting, a volume whose very existence attests to the threatened disappearance of the couch. See Claudia Guderian, Magie derCouch:Bilderund GespricheuberRaum und Settingin derPsychoanalyse (Stuttgart:Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2004). See also Guderian, Die Couchin der Psychoanalyse:Geschichteund Gegenwartvon Setting und Raum (Stuttgart:Verlag W. Kolhammer, 2004).

54.

Henrik Carpelan, "On the Importance of the Setting in the Psychoanalytic Situation," The ScandinavianPsychoanalyticReview4 (1981), p. 152.

55.

Ibid., p. 153.

56.

Ibid.

On the Couch

57

Thurber.Buenos Aires: Analyst's office with television and picture of Freud.

1999. Courtesythe artist.

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original demand that patients lie on the couch, or might also betray some frustrated professional fetishism. Or, to think of it another way, perhaps the analyst fears that the patient absorbed by creature comforts is soft, a descendant of the nineteenth-century salon-dweller that Walter Benjamin described as a somnambulant whose "gaze was enveloped in billowing curtains and swollen cushions."57 For psychoanalysis does not consider itself a soft option. The silence of the analyst, the strict routine, the scopic and social deprivations of the ritual, and of course the fee, all underpin a stringency that, as Roudinescou observes, may now be its undoing: When it comes to contemporary patients, they bear little resemblance to those of earlier periods. Generally speaking, they fit the image of this depressive society in which they live. Impregnated with contemporary nihilism, they present with narcissistic or depressive disturbances and suffer from solitude or loss of identity. Often lacking either the energy or the desire to submit to long analyses, they have trouble with regular attendance at analysts' consulting rooms. They often miss sessions and can often no longer stand more than one or two a week. Lacking financial means, they tend to suspend the analysis as soon as they realize there has been an improvement in their condition, even if that means taking it up again when the symptoms reappear. This resistance to entering into the transference setup indicates that if the market economy treats subjects like commodities, patients too have a tendency in their turn to use analysisas a form of medication and the analystas a receptacle of their sufferings.58 If, as Freud observed, "points of importance at the beginning" of analysis are "arrangements about timeand money,"these remain points of cardinal significance at its historical end. The institutionalization of psychoanalysis,predicated on the multiplication of the setting into so many private rooms where the couch and the chair would meet at right angles to make the frame, is now dominated by the very "medical order" in which, as Safouan has observed, institutional psychoanalysis also, at its cost, sought to enlist.59 In Freud's own time, his followers had already "consolidated the one trend that Freud wanted to avoid: the shrinkage of psychoanalysis into an annex of psychiatry."60In a series of photographs of clinical settings, including the disused furniture of the Royal Psychiatric Society-hard, flat, overused couches in stark contrast to Thurber's homier surrounds-the British artist Sarah Jones documents the particular demise of the couch as a psychiatric accessory.

57.

Walter Benjamin, "I [The Interior, the Trace]," in TheArcadesProject,trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 213.

58.

Roudinescou, WhyPsychoanalysis?,p. 140.

59.

Safouan, JacquesLacan, p. 63. See also Jean Clavreul, L'ordremedical(Paris: Seuil, 1978).

60.

Siegfried Bernfeld, "On Psychoanalytic Training," PsychoanalyticQuarterly(1962), p. 467, as cited in Safouan, JacquesLacan, p. 62.

59

On the Couch

In vanishing, however, the couch has become newly visible. While psyand choanalysis, psychotherapy, seemingly any therapy involving "talk" have lost currency-both in the psychotropic culture of drug contemporary psychiatry and in that most discursive of cultural spaces, the university-a surprising number of artists have repaired to the couch.

Two trends of thought about psychoanalysis seem to be at work in these recent projects. One extends an interest of some Conceptual art in the Freudian logic of collecting and is materialized in particularly

photographic and object-based comSarahJones.Consulting Room (Couch) (XIV).

1997. CourtesyMaureenPaley.

Plush-the

pendiums. Another seeks to explore, within the medium of video, the "dynamics of transference" in psychoanalysis.61

material in which traces are left especially easily.

-Walter Benjamin Susan Hiller's After the Freud Museum (1995) investigates Freud's habits of collecting. Each of fifty brown cardboard boxes, of the type used by archaeologists in for storing and sorting samples, contains a selection of specimens-potsherds polythene bags, toys, chemists' vials filled with the waters of ancient rivers, a miniature television monitor--each piece artfully arranged, titled, and accompanied on the inside lid by a supplementary text or picture. Box 021, "Joy," for example,

contains a set of thirty-six mounted slides, duplicates of the glass slides Hiller discovered in the Freud Museum in London. "I sorted and catalogued the remnants and found there were four types: scientific specimens, miniature curiosities, traditional magic lantern slides, and early Disney cartoon strips."62Echoing both the cabinet of curiosities and the Fluxbox, After the Freud Museum makes the heterogeneity of Freud's collections its organizing principle and connects with Freud as, in Forrester'sdescription, "a collector of farts and grimaces, an archaeologist of rubbish 61.

62.

Sigmund Freud, "The Dynamics of Transference" (1912), in TheStandardEdition,vol. 12.

See Susan Hiller, AftertheFreudMuseum(London: Book Works Press, 2000).

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avant la lettre, as well as a collector of the fading yet precious detritus of Western civilization."63 In 1995, Cornelia Parker, too, made a pilgrimage to the couch, extracting a souvenir, a few feathers plucked from the pillow on which once the heads of analysands rested. From this trace of the talking cure she produced another, a photogram. Parker also collected samples of nicotine. Taking custody of rags used to clean the tarnish of cigar smoke from articles in the museum, she harvested Freud's exhalations as a material for drawing. For Parker, Freud's feathers, and Freud himself, were to be part of a larger set of historical figures, whose physical traces (including, for example, a feather found floating through the air in Benjamin Franklin's attic) are incorporated into her oeuvre.

Hiller and Parker explore of collecting, Freud's principle Hiller by assembling a heterogeneous collection of objects "after" Freud, Parker by taking her specimens "from" Freud. Both reflect on "the spirit of 'scientific' acquisition pervading Freud's collections."64 Thurber and Jones, too, participate in Freud's propensity to collect.

None of these artists produces anything like a comprehensive archive.

Nor did Freud. "This was never meant to be a visual catalog comparing and contrasting different offices from various parts of the globe," Thurber says, but a limited 63.

64.

.........

b

4

Forrester, "Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist,"p. 122.

Ibid., p. 136.

6&

I& ra~~

A

I444 4.

t

Ila

a

Top:Susan Hiller.Chamin-ha: From the Freud Museum. 1991-97. Courtesythe artistand TimothyTaylorGallery,London.

Bottom:CorneliaParker.Feather from Freud's pillow (from his couch). 1998.

CourtesyFrithStreetGallery,London.

On the Couch

61

series, in keeping with the artist's other projects documenting site types, motel rooms and abandoned houses, for example.65 Freud's model of collecting is parapraxes, expansive but selective, aspiring to initiate new collections-dreams, to combine these with the collection of antique objects that repreand jokes-and sented, for him, civilization itself. In the antique setting of psychoanalysis, the ancient collection and the psychoanalytic one rub elbows in a dialectical fashion: "The model of the dream consistently subverts the model of permanence offered by the ancient statues in their cases, standing guard over desk and couch."66 Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document, begun in 1973, is a psycho-conceptual from the maternal subject position, the museum of maternity commemorating, early childhood of the artist's son.67 At one level, this exhibition of the maternalinfantile relation both extends and counters Freud's collection of antiquities, which Forrester describes, paraphrasing Marx, as "a concise compendium of his collection in which "every piece or item ... represented version of civilization"-a a paternal figure standing guard over the mysterious feminine."68 For Post-Partum Document offers its own set of fragmentary relics-textiles, casts, tablets engraved collection in which every element refers to the with mysterious characters-a maternal figure Freudian psychoanalysis overlooks. It adopts Freud's own habits of collecting to constitute the maternal subject both materially and linguistically, in things and in words. It partakes of Freud's ambition to turn dreams, jokes, and slips of the tongue into the "serious stuff of science," extending that logic to the 65.

66.

Thurber, conversation with the author, October 13, 2004.

Forrester, "Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist,"p. 130.

67.

68.

See Mary Kelly, Post-Partum Document (London: Routledge Forrester, "Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist," p. 137.

& Kegan Paul, 1983).

'

i.

1973-79. Courtesythe artist.

OCTOBER

62

"covert objects of shame" associated with the maternal role.69 To the archive of "farts and grimaces" assembled by Freud, Kelly adds fecal stains, baby talk, and maternal fetishism, incorporating the maternal subject and placing its objects, too, into the public discourses of psychoanalysis and of Conceptual art.

First exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London in 1976, PostPartum Document was received with indignation by the British tabloid press. The perceived scandal of a mother contaminating the maternal-infantile bond and the aesthetic autonomy of the gallery at once was predictably in keeping with the culand the art it has inspired tural anxiety that has attended psychoanalysis The Freud Museums of both its Vienna and London, accordhistory. throughout the of artists and the display of more welcomed involvement have recently ingly, as a means to in their work different ways, the contindemonstrate, contemporary cultural resonance of psychoanalysis. uing In London, the museum has presented installations by Hiller, Sophie Calle, Sarah Lucas, and Valie Export, among others. For Lucas's exhibition, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2000), the artist was given the run of the house, and trashed it. she occupied the rooms with In a series of savagely humorous interventions, installations of overturned furniture, cast-off underwear, and, assigned pride of place above the couch, an enlarged photograph of the artist's own headless torso, one nipple shown slyly protruding from a hole in her shirt. Caricaturing the 69.

Ibid., pp. 125, 126.

?i???I--. ?r ??-: ?? i

":

r, :c?I? Zlr C'

SarahLucas. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Installationview,Freud Museum,London, 2000. ? Theartist, courtesySadie ColesHQ, London.

On the Couch

63

Anna-Freudian diorama of discipleship, Lucas "played out her role as bad-girl rebel ... with singular relish and inventiveness," Linda Nochlin has observed-a transgression against the setting, a spectacular splintering of the frame, which the museum readily accommodated.70 For by taking out her defiance of the master on the setting-by enacting her negative transference to psychoanalysis in its own milieu-Lucas also claimed psychoanalysis for her own. Borrowing the title of a work by Freud in which the master himself laid siege to his own theories, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" uses psychoanalysis as an object that, in Juliet Mitchell's formulation, survives through our very efforts to destroy it: "The artist or critic is helped by the theory of psychoanalysisto develop the capacity to destroy that theory so that she or he can make use of it."71

In Vienna, the involvement of Joseph Kosuth in an exhibition to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Freud's death resulted in the formation of a foundation to create a permanent collection of work, donated by the artistsincluding John Baldessari, Jenny Holzer, Ilya Kabakov, Sherrie Levine, Haim Stainbach, and Franz West-and displayed in the former family apartment at Berggasse 19, rooms now used by the museum as library and exhibition space.

The mission of the foundation, according to Kosuth, is to assemble "an art collection in which post-Freudian thought would actually be manifested internally in the work."72 Freud himself, however, was little interested in the effect psychoanalysis began to exert on art in his own time. "The interpreter of dreams," writes Forrester, "would never have dreamed of adding a Picabia or a Duchamp to his collection of antiquities."73It is in Freud's writings that "we encounter the typical modernist objects-the readymade, the found object, the bit of detritus, the god as a shout in the street, the Surrealist transvaluation of values," not in his artistic tastes. Visiting Vienna on his honeymoon in 1921, Andre Breton called on Freud, intending to alert him to the role his theories might play in the Surrealist revolution to come-only to find that the inventor of psychoanalysis was a fatherly doctor who didn't "much like France" and was indifferent to modern art.74 Breton's recollections of that afternoon are a study in negative transference to the master, expressed as bitter disappointment in the analyst's style.

70.

Linda Nochlin, Sarah Lucas: GODIS DAD (New York: Gladstone Gallery, 2005), p. 8.

71.

Juliet Michell, "Theory as an Object," this issue, p. 33. Mitchell cites Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document,of which she observes, linking her own history to Kelly's: "I hope we have been destructive of psychoanalytic theory (though I know I have very often only related to it); it has obviously survived our, and other, more powerful attacks not only in the generic sense that it is bigger and stronger than we are. It has survived in the sense that matters: its survival can only be assured by the fact that it has changed, though certainly not utterly."

72.

Joseph Kosuth, "Text for the Sigmund Freud Museum," Foundationfor the Arts, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna,vol. 2 (1998), p. 13.

73.

Forrester, "Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist," p. 125.

74.

Andre Breton, "Interview with Doctor Freud" (1921), in The Lost Steps,trans. Mark Polizzotti (1924; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 70-71. I am grateful to David Lomas for drawing my attention to this text.

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A modest plaque at the entrance: "Dr.Freud, 2-4"; a not very attractive servant girl; a waiting room whose walls are decoratedwith four mildly allegorical engravings-Water, Fire, Earth, and Air-and with a photograph depicting the master among his collaborators;a dozen or so patients of the most pedestrian sort; and once, after the sound of a bell, several shouts in succession-not enough here to fill even the slimmest of reports. This until thefamous padded door cracks open for me. Ifind myself in the presence of a little old man with no style who receives clients in a shabby office worthy of the neighborhood G.P -Andre Breton Glenn Ligon's The Orange and Blue Feelings (2003) is an edited video recording of three meetings with his therapist. Its total length, about an hour, is that of a single session. Through the technique of dual-channel projection, therapist and patient are relegated to discrete frames, their respective scenes playing slightly out of sync. The therapist, a middle-aged woman partial to flowered prints and bangle bracelets, twirls in her swivel chair. Her foot in its kittenheeled shoe rests delicately on a cushion. Stroking her bare arm rhythmically, she stirs the bangles. Her face is never seen. A pillow tucked into the chair cradles her body to this "habitual seat, a sort of nest padded with accustomed objects," as Janet Malcolm has described it to "a the analyst's armchair, comparing chronic invalid's chair."75 The patient, Ligon himself, remains offscreen, his frame filled by the unoccupied end of a couch. Camera movements are small and desultory, mimicthe talking cure, eyes sliding king the glassy gaze of a patient undergoing a over of assortment The camera aimlessly prosaic props. lingers on a box of tissues in front of an open window. Catching the breeze, the paper ruffles. An untidy pile of bags sunk on the floor, a houseplant, a shelf lined with books, bric-a-brac, a Freud doll, a corner of patterned carpet, a vase of flowers, a row of framed photographs, a diploma, and a desk piled with papers provide the camera with other vignettes. Once, it jerks unexpectedly toward the window, briefly training its lens on the street below. For almost an hour we listen in as the invisible patient and his Gena Rowlandsesque therapist explore Ligon's anxieties about some recent work.

Transference, writes Laplanche, is "the very milieu of analysis, in the sense of its surrounding environment."76 The milieu of the transference, he observes, is most perceptible when change is in the air, for "one notices a milieu less when one is plunged in it; more so when it is rather briskly altered or when one leaves it."77 Ligon's video portrays an analysis in media res. The figure of the analyst, with her husky voice, coquettish wriggling, and flamboyant dress, is recorded with detachment. If the camera's gaze falls on the foot resting on the pillow, this seems 75.

76.

77.

Janet Malcolm, Psychoanalysis:TheImpossibleProfession(London: Granta Books, 1983), p. 47.

Laplanche, "Transference,"p. 216.

Ibid., p. 217.

On the Couch

GlennLigon. The Orange and Blue Feelings. 2003. Installationview at and Museum,Philadelphia.Photo:AaronIgler.

TheFabricWorkshop

65

66

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to be as much because, in face-to-face therapy such as this, the patient cannot always be staring back at the therapist and must find relief from the other's gaze somewhere, as because the shoe seems flirtatious. The setting, too, is presented with scant curiosity, like the accustomed environment of a neighbor's living room in which a vase or a picture is occasionally moved but without altering the overall effect. And if the camera wanders around the room from time to time, poking into corners and grazing objects, its investigation is perfunctory. The long, static shots do not probe, highlight, or inventory the room's appointments so much as confirm their familiar presence. Bad taste and comfortable clutter have become the institutional furniture of the frame.

What returns attention to to the milieu of psychoanalysis, according is This fresh notice.

When it attracts the milieu is altered, Laplanche, change. occurs especially when the analysand "acts out" by committing "an infidelity to the analytic relation."78 The patient actualizes desire, goes outside the relationship, acts on an impulse (to have an affair, in the classic scenario) rather than bringing this wish to analysis. Freud called this lateral transference, an action that sidesteps the analyst. In The Orange and Blue Feelings, Ligon agonizes over the possibility that therapy will vitiate his art, that "a more balanced life makes for banal work."

Preferring to keep his art separate from his therapy (for reasons that become evident as the recorded session's crash tutorial in postmodernism falters), he recHis ognizes the threat to the analytic relation this withholding represents. solution is to make his therapy the subject of his art, to turn the consulting room into a set, actually to move in. This gesture, however, goes beyond infidelity to the analytic situation and dissolves it.

The acting out that is the real drama of The Orange and Blue Feelings is Ligon's shattering of the frame. He nullifies the analytic contract by taking over the role of the analyst as "the director of the method."79 The video begins with Ligon informing the analyst that overnight he has listened to the recording of a previous session. ("I thought my voice sounded really faggy," he tells her. "That's another thing I have to deal with in therapy, why I hate my voice"-to which the therapist weakly replies, "Oh dear.") Presently, in response to Ligon's account of a childhood memory he holds in his mind as a photograph, uncertain when or even if the event ever occurred, the therapist, recovering her authority, announces, "It's called a screen memory, in fact."

By this time, however, the analyst has become the star of the show, the body on the screen, and it is the patient who is directing the analysis.8( The analyst must be "director of the method," contends Laplanche. Failing "there is no analysis."81 In Ligon's video, analysis dissolves. Yet the situation this, another suggests possibility. According to Laplanche, the patient's acting out does 78.

Ibid.

79.

Ibid., p. 227.

80.

Apropos of matters of time and money, Ligon reports that he paid the therapist a location fee for the use of the consulting room for filming, including footage of the empty office shot after hours.

Glenn Ligon, conversation with the author, March 9, 2005.

81.

Laplanche, "Transference,"p. 227.

On the Couch

67

not lead inevitably to rupture. An act of infidelity, he proposes, "may be drawn back into that relation, interpreted, in sum, as a transference of transference: 'What you could not, did not wish to tell me, you have signified, enacted, outside."'82 The Orange and Blue Feelings extends over three sessions and concerns the mysterious disappearance of a painting. A portrait of Malcolm X, based on an image copied from a children's coloring book and intended for an exhibition at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis-"the most interesting painting in the show"-turned from the up missing shipment, stirring anxieties of loss and longthat associates in with ing Ligon therapy early childhood experience. The portrait was actually produced with the help of a child, he explains to the therapist. As an artist-in-residence at the Walker, he was asked to take part in the museum's educational programming, an obligation he discharged by inviting local schoolchildren to "color in" motifs from his archival source material: vintage coloring books featursuch as Harriet Tubman, George ing black heroes of American history-figures and Malcolm X. one child responded with a vision of When Washington Carver, Malcolm resplendent with rouged cheeks and pink lipstick, Ligon, captivated by the fearlessness of "the little queer child who puts lipstick on the image of the father," translated the motif into a large-scale painting that was to be the centerpiece of the Walker exhibition.

"A little boy did that?" the therapist asks. "I'm assuming it was a he," Ligon answers uncertainly, sounding suddenly curious about what the therapist is saying, "unless I'm just projecting myself backward." Up to then, the therapist has been he hung up on the fact that Ligon copies. Even as a child, he acknowledges, "never drew from imagination," preferring to copy from source material. "Maybe it's time," she urges, adding, "Maybe it's long past time." "Throw your stencils on to the fire, so to speak?" he demands. "Mmm, I don't know." "I have a lot of anxiety about talking about art work in therapy." He tells her instead about making art in school as a small child, about being ridiculed by a teacher for painting a papiermache ocean liner orange and blue. "You'd think art class would be the one class where anything would be fine, where there wouldn't be rules," she replies.

"Everybody has an agenda," he reminds her. "I ended up painting the boat black."

"You don't like my colors. Fuck you!" she cheers. "I was just thinking about people in the gallery listening to this," he remarks. "It's embarrassing."

Ligon showed The Orange and Blue Feelings alongside the original portrait of Malcolm X. He recovered the rolled canvas from the trash after inadvertentlyit in a studio sweep-up. "I found it unconsciously, to say the word-discarding between the first session we recorded and the second," he announces to the therapist toward the end of the tape, adding, "I was thinking about the fact that I didn't tell you." Ligon's infidelity, his lateral move-what he "could not, did not wish to tell" his therapist and has instead "signified, enacted outside"-cycles back into the analysis as the ending of the story. His disclosure is timed to conclude the 82.

Ibid., p. 217.

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work, the video-analysis he is directing. Ligon broke off therapy shortly after the work was first shown.83 But if the video records the dissolution of the analysis, it also enacts what Laplanche calls "a transference of transference" from one locus to another: "In other places-during possibilities analysis, outside analysis-other of 'transference' are available to the analysand, other poles for the elaboration of an individual destiny."84 Video'sreal medium is a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object-an Other-and invest it in the Self.

Krauss -Rosalind Critics reviewing Going There, the 2003 New York gallery exhibition in which Ligon first presented The Orange and Blue Feelings, expressed surprise and disappointment at its apparently confessional mode. In contrast to Ligon's previous work, including stenciled word paintings, in which passages of text are applied to white canvases-works that, as one critic observed, "managed to address subjectivity and its politics by way of elegantly conceived formal frameworks"85-The Orange and Blue Feelings instead seemed self-centered, seemed to summon Rosalind Krauss's early critique of video as producing "an aesthetics of narcissism."

By connecting the medium of video and the condition of narcissism, Krauss observed, "one can recast the opposition between the reflective and the reflexive into the terms of the psychoanalytic project. Because it is there, too, in the drama of the couched subject, that the narcissistic re-projection of a frozen self is pitted against the analytic (or reflexive) mode."86 The reflexive mode of analysis facilitates alienation from a self-image that encapsulates the subject. "The process of analysis is one of breaking the hold of this fascination with the mirror."87 Or, as Laplanche expresses it, there is a primordial split at the heart of transference, "which means he is other than me because he is other quite simply that the other is the other... than himself. External alterity refers back to internal alterity."88 As Laplanche observes, there is an "essential dissymmetry" in the analytic situation, a distance, or difference, that is preserved especially by the silence of the analyst. In Ligon's video, dissymmetry is the organizing principle. Therapist and patient are relegated to separate screens. One is visible, the other is not. One is a woman, the other a man. One is white and the other, as we know, is black. For Ligon's work has often referred, indirectly, to the identity and subjectivity of the artist. His early paintings quote from literary texts. In one particularly well-known work, Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White 83.

84.

85.

86.

87.

88.

Glenn Ligon, conversation with the author, March 7, 2004.

Laplanche, "Transference,"p. 231.

Johanna Burton, "Glenn Ligon, D'Amelio Terras,"Artforum(March 2004), p. 184.

Rosalind Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism," October1 (Spring 1976), p. 57.

Ibid., p. 58.

Laplanche, "Transference,"p. 221.

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69

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Ligon. Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background). 1990-91.

Courtesythe artist.

Background) (1990-91), this sentence written by Zora Neale Hurston is stenciled in black oilstick on a door-sized white panel. The writing is crisply legible at the top but, like a newspaper passed from hand to hand, becomes smudged and murky from overuse toward the bottom. Gummed and clotted, the stencils transfer the inky oil from one application to the next down the panel so that each line is less distinct than the one above. Toward the bottom end, the text fades out into illegibility.

Continuing to investigate the medium of printing in Runaways (1993), a lithographic series, Ligon solicited physical descriptions of himself from ten friends and

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typeset the texts in the format and graphic style of his archival source, midnineteenth-century posters designed to track down fugitive slaves. One read: "Ran away,Glenn Ligon. He's a shortish broad-shouldered black man, pretty dark-skinned, with glasses."Throughout his work, Ligon mines text to represent the historical and cultural construction of identity, using the figure Glenn Ligon as a frequent, but not exclusive, point of reference. He returns to this strategy in The Orange and Blue Feelings,at one point handing over to the therapist a school evaluation report in which the child, Glenn Ligon, is described as a moody boy who sometimes withdraws.

When he brought the report home, he recounts, "Mymother did a dramatic reading of that," warning him, "This will go on your record"-meaning, he elaborates, "my record with a capital R" As she saw it, "That'show black kids get labeled."

Text, Krauss observes, is what is missing from performance-based video. Its absence is what renders the medium narcissistic. For performance, she notes, conventionally relies on some form of text, "whether that is a fixed choreography, a written script, a musical score, or a sketchy set of notes around which to improvise."89 By contrast, video performance, centered on the body of the performer before the camera, produces the effect of a "collapsed present" equivalent to the space-time of mirror reflection, or the patient on the couch-the very task of analysisbeing to convert the "fascinationwith the mirror,"or reflective mode, into a reflexive one. "The analytic project," Krauss observes, is one in which "the patient disengages from . . . his reflected self, and through a method of reflexiveness, rediscovers the real time of his own history. He exchanges the atemporality of repetition for the temporality of change."90In short, psychoanalysisis not a confessional mode, in which self-image is nurtured, but a gradual process of alienation from the sovereign self.

Ligon has consistently relied on thick citation to represent the historical construction of identity through transference. "Making a painting, for me," he explains, "is akin to making a film adaptation of a text: it's just one possible way out of many of responding to a given text."91His experiment with video-analysis appears to be a departure from this practice of citation because the text it adapts, or interprets, is an autobiographical narrative. But if we understand psychoanalysis as a reflexive mode, opening onto the dimension of alterity, then its task is to render the subject, to borrow a term favored by Ligon, "opaque."92"Yes,you can take me for an other, because I am not what I think I am; because I respect and maintain the other in me."93This, writes Laplanche, is the statement the analyst addresses to the analysand. It also offers a possible description of how the work of Glenn Ligon attempts to address its audience.

89.

Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,"p. 53.

90.

Ibid., p. 58.

91.

Glenn Ligon, interview by Byron Kim, in Glenn Ligon: un/becoming (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1998), p. 53.

As Lacan puts it, "In this labor, which he undertakes to reconstruct this constructfor another,he 92. finds again the fundamental alienation which made him construct it like anotherone, and which has always destined it to be stripped from him by another"(Lacan, The Language of the Self trans. Anthony Wilden [New York:Delta, 1968], p. 11). Cited in Krauss, "Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism,"p. 58.

93.

Laplanche, "Transference,"p. 228.

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71

I don't rememberif he asked me to kiss him. I don't rememberat all.

-A contributor to an inadequate history of conceptual art "Sometimes artists rush in where critics refuse to tread," Yvonne Rainer once remarked.94 So in 1998, the artist Silvia Kolbowski wrote to sixty artists, inviting them to take part in an oral history project she would call an inadequate history of conceptual art.95 Each artist was asked to select a Conceptual work-"not your own, of the period between 1965 and 1975, which you personally witto attend a taping session with Kolbowski. at the time"-and nessed/experienced admonished to refrain from refreshing their memwere Prospective participants ories by conducting research and, in the taping itself, to avoid disclosing their own identities or those of the artists whose works they described. Twenty-two in face-to-face sessions with Kolbowski, who artists ultimately participated recorded their statements and videotaped their hands as they spoke.96 In the resulting installation, projected images of the speakers' gestures played in a darkened room while their voices could be heard in an adjoining space. The two recordings were deliberately run out of sync so that an "essential dissymmetry" Yvonne Rainer, "Looking Myself in the Mouth," in A WomanWho.. .: Essays, Interviews,Scripts 94.

(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 89.

95.

Silvia Kolbowski, "an inadequate history of conceptual art," October92(Spring 2000), p. 53.

96.

Of the sixty invited artists, forty agreed to take part, of whom twenty-two were recorded.

Silvia Kolbowski.an inadequate history of conceptual art.

1998-99.

View of audio/visual installation from video room, Secession, Vienna. Photo: Hannes Boeck.

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between the hand and the voice, or the video and the audio components of the piece, was strictly maintained.

By asking artists to describe a work from memory, and in her presence, and by imposing a set of rules on the procedure, Kolbowski set up, loosely speaking, a psychoanalytic situation. "I thought that if I asked artists to speak from memory about Conceptual projects from the past, the recountings would include both valuable recollections and the fallacies of human memory," she has commented.97 "I'm somewhat resisting your original request that it has to be something that I experienced," one contributor begins, setting the psychoanalytic tone of the piece. "I guess I should ask myself why this stuck in my mind all these years, over thirty years," reflects another. "I guess the reason I'm talking about it is that it stuck with me for a long time as to what this was about," one acknowledges. "It's easy to remember, it's easy to remember, it's easy to remember," chants another speaker, as if to will the act.

"An inadequate history" might be another name for psychoanalysis itself, for the subject of psychoanalysis is constructed in resistance and repression, in forgetting as much as in remembering. "Freud's analysis of the collection of screen memories revealed how memories are tendentious, how their function as witnesses is a false function, a false form of remembering instead of desiring," Forrester observes.98 "A screen museum" is his description of the Freud Museum in Vienna, "a museum of fake souvenirs," tokens of the kind by which we purport to remember what we actually desire. It is worth remembering, too, that this screen museum was conceived in 1971, the midpoint of the time period, from 1965 to 1975, that brackets an inadequate history. And it is important to observe that certain of the strategies informing the installation of the Freud Museum are also characteristic of Conceptual art. These include the displacement of the object by the photograph and the text and the concomitant frustration of scopic desire, as well as the reorientation of the museum or gallery from an exhibition space, or space of display, to an archive.99 The Freud Museum, with its "derisible atmosphere," its photographic record of the rooms in Freud's time, its research library, its carefully labeled and indexed "minor memorabilia"-and, ultimately, its art collection curated by Kosuth-is a screen museum on the Conceptual art model.

In particular, it invites comparison with Kelly's Post-Partum Document, a pivotal work of Conceptual art that is often omitted from that history. One aim of an inadequate history, according to Kolbowski, is to contest exclusionary histories by reconceiving Conceptual art in terms that, as the artist has noted, "allow for the inscription of women artists," some of whose work (unlike Kelly's) still is not well known, into an alternative art history.100 For an inadequate history, 97.

Kolbowski, "an inadequate history,"p. 53.

98.

Forrester, "Collector, Naturalist, Surrealist,"p. 130.

99.

See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Conceptual Art 1962-1969: From the Aesthetics of Administration to the Critique of Institutions," October55(Winter 1990), pp. 105-43.

100. Silvia Kolbowski, conversation with the author, May 12, 2003. Kolbowski cites, for example, the exhibition L'artconceptuel:Uneperspective,organized at the Musee d'art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in

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Kolbowski therefore of the term:

invited participants

to employ a notably inclusive definition

For the sake of the project, the definition of conceptual art should be broad enough to encompass such phenomena of that period as actions documented through drawings, photographs, film, and video; concepts executed in the form of drawings or photographs; objects where the end product is primarily a record of the precipitant concept, and performative activities which sought to question the conventions of dance and theater.101 Such an elastic description, as Alexander Alberro has observed, privileged "the most transitory manifestations of the movement, those most likely to have left 'inadequate' traces and thus most dependent on the memory of direct witnesses for insight into their initial receptions"-those, in short, that are most likely to reveal a screen history.102 One contributor highlights this very possibility by observing of her own recollection, "I like telling people about it, because I like it a lot. But I don't think I actually saw it." A male speaker, describing a video work that addressed viewers by solicitation, reports: "I don't remember if he asked me to kiss him. I don't remember at all."

As well as expanding the history of Conceptual art, an inadequate history, as Rosalyn Deutsche has observed, "forges a link between history and psychoanalysis."103For the manner in which speech and gesture are combined in the work is, as she points out, evocative of the hybrid discourse that constitutes one of Freud's principal clinical discoveries: that the words and gestures of the not the same analysand may carry message. In an inadequate history, visual attention falls on the small gestures of the body, particularly on the hands. The subjects sit facing the camera. Sometimes the camera is trained directly on the body, so close that the rhythm of breathing becomes part of the action; more often a table occupies the middle ground between the camera and the speaker.

Fingers twist and pinch, tap the table, fidget. Hands stir the air, fly out of the frame, or fold together. Gestures, creasing and unfolding pockets of space, betray the effort of recollection as memories are traced, gathered in, and pinned down. canceled Concentrating almost forensically on the hand of the artist-famously as a marker of the artist's presence in Conceptual work-the videotape excludes the facial image. The stutters of memory to which Kolbowski refers consume the body as much as the voice.

1989, and its catalog, as an official history from which work by women was largely excluded, noting that this show "set the tone for the 'return"' of Conceptual art in contemporary practice.

101. Kolbowski, "an inadequate history,"p. 53.

102. Alexander Alberro, "Silvia Kolbowski: American Fine Arts Co.," Artforum38, no. 4 (December 1999), pp. 148-49.

103. Rosalyn Deutsche, "Inadequacy," in Silvia Kolbowski:inadequate ... Like ... Power (Vienna: Secession, 2004), pp. 77-78.

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.

A _'

.~~~~~~~~~~~~~'

Kolbowski. an inadequate

history of conceptual art.

1998-99. Details.

Audio/video installation, first installed at American Fine Arts, New York,1999.

Kolbowski's own voice is never heard. Her role in eliciting and collecting these oral histories is marked only by the texture of a silent and invisible presence, a presence that structures the work as, in Krauss's terms, a reflexive situation rather than a reflective one. As in psychoanalysis, the listener establishes the parameters. The speaker is asked not to research the work to be described (a rule that resonates with Freud's instruction to patients not to prepare material for sessions), not to reveal her or his own identity, and not to disclose the authorship of

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the work described. Some participants break the frame. A few have obviously researched their contributions, delivered with a fluidity and factual accuracy that betrays them by comparison with others who, struggling to remember, piece together stories that are full of holes. Kolbowski's an inadequatehistoryinterrogates the history of Conceptual art psychoanalytically by demonstrating that those who witnessed it, even those who produced it, cannot exactly remember it.

If we interpreta transferential movement, it is not to attack it as a defense, nor to resolve it; it is in the end to make it evolve, to help in its evolution.

-Jean Laplanche An earlier postmodernism expanded the compass of psychoanalysis beyond the confines of the consulting room to embrace a broader culture. The current return to the analytic scene instead reconnects with the history of psychoanalysis as a practice and, even more, an institution in dissolution, making historical psychoanalysis visible in its vanishing. "Even in its failing," Roudinescou observes, psychoanalysis has a role to play in waking the depressive society from its dreamless, drug-induced torpor.104"Less theoretical and more clinical," more eclectic in technique and "detached from the conflictual passions that marked the preceding period," the contemporary psychoanalysis of Roudinescou's description shares something in common with contemporary art.105Both have reached the point of "greatest resistance," which is the analysis of the frame.

The survival of the artist as a pivotal figure in postmodernism, beyond the putative death of the author-a central tenet of much Conceptual art-in itself evidences the role transference plays in establishing, and sustaining, a dynamics of transference

in art. In an inadequate history of conceptual art, Kolbowski reflects on

the role of the artist, even the most self-effacing Conceptual artist, as a figure of transference. An unidentified artist describing an unidentified work by another unidentified artist elicits transference on the part of the audience-through the enactment of transference itself. The presence in the scene of a listener, even (or especially) one who is silent and invisible, stimulates this dynamic. What is of even greater concern to the histories of Conceptual art and institutional critique, however, is transference to the frame. The vaunted austerity of Conceptual art concentrated attention on "matters of time and money," and of setting-on opening and closing hours, the duration of an exhibition or a work, the function of captions and catalogs. These seemingly neutral elements showed the frame itself to be, as Laplanche writes of analysis, "situated in transference."

Yet despite being, as Joan Copjec observed in 1984, "coextensive with the very field of psychoanalysis,"transference is a pointedly neglected dimension of its 104.

105.

Roudinescou, WhyPsychoanalysis?,p. 143.

Ibid., p. 142.

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history.106 In cultural criticism, those who invoke psychoanalysis give a wide berth to transference-wary, perhaps, of the concept's association with a clinical practice that is seen to be outmoded. It is a given of contemporary criticism that the theory and practice of psychoanalysis are separable, that psychoanalytic theory has achieved autonomy from the frame. But this division (in psychoanalytic terms, this splitting) has given rise to an academic psychoanalysis that is often dismissed, with some justification, as institutionalized, docile, and dogmatic-a form of cultural criticism in which the critic effectively "effaces her- or himself as a subject who knows what is going on."

Psychoanalytic criticism, like art that explores psychoanalysis, has a responsibility, in Laplanche's terms, to "evolve." "Perhaps we are looking the wrong way round" in seeking to apply psychoanalysis to culture, Laplanche proposes. "Maybe transference is already, 'in itself,' outside the clinic."107 For Laplanche, transference is always already extramural, beyond the clinic, and the ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is a "transference of transference," returning transference to the world. How, then, does psychoanalysis end? "Briefly," writes Laplanche, "this problem of ending replays, precisely, the whole problem of analysis."108

106.

107.

108.

Joan Copjec, "Transference: Letters and the Unknown Woman," October28(Spring 1984), p. 68.

Laplanche, "Transference,"p. 222.

Ibid., p. 218.

An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn*

BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH

Benjamin Buchloh: Whenever I see a work of yours, a typical art historian's question comes to mind: Who was more important for you, Warhol or Beuys?

Thomas Hirschhorn: Those were the two artists I discovered for myself in the late 1970s. From 1978 to about 1983 I attended the School of Applied Arts in Zurich, and in 1978-79, each had a one-man show, Beuys at the Kunstmuseum and Warhol at the Kunsthaus Zurich. They were equally important; I could say that both were in fact my teachers, though I never studied under them.

Buchloh: What you learned from them was to resolve the apparent contradiction between Warhol's insistence on an aesthetic of technical reproduction and Beuys's continuous evocation of an individual and intense materiality, a kind of secularized magic?

Hirschhorn: Absolutely. What I like tremendously about the work of Beuys-beyond the his social engagement, of course, which led to defeats as we know-is fact that he revolutionized the idea of sculpture by introducing materials like felt, fat, and conducting materials such as copper that had never been used before. And he did all of that together with his shamanism, which I take seriously as a form of artistic expression.

Buchloh: But you don't adopt the role of the artist as shaman for yourself?

Hirschhorn: Not at all. Quite the contrary. But I find it highly interesting as an artistic tactic. Both Beuys and Warhol outed themselves as artists at a relatively late age, or at least didn't do so in their earliest years. Warhol is for me by no means the apparent opposite of Beuys. Having myself come out of a school for applied arts, and initially having planned to become a graphic designer, I see Warhol's work as something impossible to surpass. He continued to be an illustrator and a designer, and although he conformed to the time in which he lived, his expression was highly critical.

Buchloh: Is that what Europeans still think? Do you really see his work as critical?

Hirschhorn: Fine. Youlive in America. I believe it is. And, of course, what impresses

*

This interview was transcribed by Philipp Angermeyer and translated by Russell Stockman.

OCTOBER113, Summer2005, pp. 77-100. ? 2005 BenjaminH. D. Buchloh.

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me about both of these figures-as human beings-is their extreme engagement with their art.

Buchloh:If one would describe the contrast a bit schematically, one could say that in Warhol, we have glamour and design as seduction. And on the other side, in Beuys, we have magic and transubstantiation in the shamanistic tradition. In your work, these two opposing strategies find a quite remarkable synthesis:you perform the travestyof glamour and seduction, and instead of relying on magic and suggesting mystical transformation, articulate a continuous criticism of reification, a transformation of a different kind.

Hirschhorn: Warhol'sproduction is perfectly simple, clear, American: he gave forms to things and shoved them in the public's face. With Beuys it is not primarily the mysticism that intrigues me; what moves me is his continuous appeal to the public, the fact that he was constantly talking, approaching people, carrying on conversations. He didn't see art as something sacred but as a contribution to the ongoing discussion. I learned that from Joseph Beuys.

Buchloh: Then one can say that you have changed their specific positions radically. On the one hand, your work emphatically affirms the need for industrial production as a model for artistic production. And on the other, it affirms the need for communicative structures that appeal to as many participants as possible.

Hirschhorn:That is what I have tried to learn from Warhol and Beuys.

Buchloh:Both artists were originally engaged in a form of radical democratization.

Obviously Beuys's model originated in the aftermath of trauma and some forms of religious substitution, if not attempts at redemption. Warhol's, by contrast-clearly more American-took its point of departure in the populist utopianism that had been delivered in America by commercial design and consumer culture. These are two very contradictory approaches, yet after all they concretize the very structures in which most of us have experienced secularization, democratization, and the semblance of equality in the last few decades. I would say that this dialectic of cult and consumption is one of the foundations of your work as well, yet it is further radicalized and still more secularized. Warhol ended up where he began, as a producer of advertising. Fetishism and seduction, advertising and design (which in the end became merely a new style in Warhol) are again deployed in your work, yet with a newly invigorated critical radicality. As for Beuys, I would say that his promises of "art by all" were increasingly undermined precisely by his cultic stance. It was essentially a total deification of a single artist, and no longer had anything at all to do with the radically democratic intent with which he started out.

Hirschhorn:Correct, but I also admire these artists precisely because they were so radical and so fully engaged in their work, if perhaps wrongly so. Now, after a few years have passed, one responds to their work critically. That is why I can say, "I love Joseph Beuys and I love Andy Warhol."

An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn

79

Buchloh: That brings me to the next question: How do you relate to the generation that preceded you, namely the Conceptual artists? I have frequently wondered whether their project of institutional critique was important to you. For example, Daniel Buren's work at some point performed the most the museum, and radical critique of existing institutions, especially Lawrence Weiner's work engaged in the most precise contestation of traditional materializations of art. How did you reverse their positions and return to a position that is very much concerned with material production?

Hirschhorn: I could now simply lean back and somewhat high-handedly produce an answer to your question. I could criticize these approaches to institutional critique on the part of Daniel Buren. I don't wish to do this, and cannot, since I have to say in all honesty that I totally blocked out the generation that preceded me. Not because I knew nothing about them, but because I was so caught up in the very idea of being an artist, or not being an artist, that I never even considered this question of institutional critique at all. And it would be highly inappropriate now if I were to look back and say that my art was a reaction to, or a critical rejection of, theirs. But I would say that because of the Minimalist design quality of their work, I had to turn away from it.

Buchloh: I suppose you refer to the highly stylized, reductivist, and not to say purist, design qualities that eventually became evident in Conceptual art?

Would those not have provoked you, and determined your response to be one of chaotic, polymorph materials and impure structures?

Hirschhorn: Of course. Naturally I had a problem with the excesses of design, because I know what corporate identity is, and I know what advertising is. That is obvious. But, most important, I never shared the notion of a critique of institutions. That was not a problem for me. And I found that conflict in the work of Buren; I speak only of him because he is the most radical. Because his work is so totally designed, it suddenly raises utterly strange questions: Where does the design end, for example? Or does it?

Buchloh: Where does the radicality end and where does the design begin?

Hirschhorn: Precisely. And of course where one sees the limits of the work one sees that he is in a conflict, and I noticed them fairly early. In the work in which he makes museum guards wear striped vests, for example: on the one hand, that project is a logical continuation of his ideas. On the other, people come into the picture, and they can only go along with it because they work in that museum and are obliged to wear these vests. Here we must confront the question of the individual and of free choice.

Buchloh: So one could argue that you turned away from the critique of institutions because it seemed more important to you to focus on other elements of discourse, such as advertising, design, and commodity culture. To bring those elements into critical focus struck you as much more pressing and urgent than the critique of museums?

Hirschhorn: That is totally correct. As I said, the museum was important to me.

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Naturally I want to change the museum. I would like to see museums open twenty-four hours with free admission all the time. I like going to museumsarchaeological, local history, natural history museums.

I also go to museums for a formal reason, or for an artistic, sculptural reason. I am interested in how things are displayed because I actually find that display is a form of physical experience. One needs time and space to present and display, and that has always been highly interesting to me. And museums make very important contributions. For example, after the Berlin Wall came down, I remember visiting the museums in the eastern sector two or three times. I recall one exhibition, how monuments were designed during the DDR period. It was incredible; those were the most beautiful exhibitions I've seen. Because you want to display something and make something clear, you want to give space and time to that experience of the display. I find that definition and usage of space very important.

Buchloh: Let's move to the question of a criticism of sculptural, instead of instituYour work, as sculpture, transcends even the most tional, conventions. radical changes that occurred on the level of materials and morphologies in Pop and post-Minimalist sculpture. No one knew at first what your work actually was. Was it a painting or a relief? Was it a collage or an object? Was it an installation? Can you take it with you? Can you dismantle it? Can you throw it away? Do you have to collect it? This was an incredibly radical attack on what, at that point in the late 1970s, was the most advanced sculptural orthodoxy, namely site-specificity. Suddenly you came along and undermined all of that by using materials that were seemingly interchangeable, that did not necessarily have to be preserved. You opened the production of sculpture to other realms of experience that post-Minimalist sculpture had totally shut out, namely the realm of the everyday and the memory of history.

Furthermore, you repositioned sculpture at a level of crude banality and tawdry cheapness that would have scared most of the artists of the precedmuch as they might have wished to orient themselves ing generation, around Pop art conventions (such as Dan Graham). That was one of the first shocks that your work triggered in me when I saw your Skulptur Sortier Station pavilion in Mfinster in 1997.1 For me that was one of your most important works, in which all of these questions were approached in a wholly new way: What makes sculpture public? What could nowadays be called specific about the site of sculpture? What are the proper materials for sculpture? What are the different discourses that can be addressed by the experience of sculpture?

And perhaps most important, can historical reflection be one of them?

Hirschhorn: Just so that we keep everything in mind: I said earlier that Beuys opened up for me this issue of materials in his attack on the rigidity of traditional sculptural materials. Furthermore, he opened the question of 1.

Hirschhorn's SkulpturSortierStation was first installed in the international exhibition Sculpture Projects,organized by Kasper Koenig in Miinster, Germany in 1997.

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sculptural function with his idea of social sculpture. By contrast, I didn't remotely want to enter a dimension that had anything to do with either nature or with the esoteric, with the spirit, with mystical processes. Rather, my idea was that I wanted to make sculpture out of a plan, out of the second dimension. I said to myself, "I want to make sculpture, but I don't want to create any volumes." I only want to work in the third dimension-to conceive sculpture out of the plan, the idea, the sketch. That is what I want to make a sculpture with: the thinking and conceiving, the various plans and the planning.

Buchloh: Transforming an industrial logo, for example, into a sculpture: Would that qualify as an example?

Hirschhorn: Exactly. You have a plan, and then create it in the third dimension.

Voila. That additional dimension is the work.

Buchloh: And why is that translation into the third dimension desirable?

Hirschhorn: It's not that it is desirable. It is rather that when you transfer a plan or a sketch into the third dimension, it becomes an altogether different proposition, and also changes its very substance.

Buchloh: And does it address itself to the viewers' demands ? Or does it merely address the concept of sculpture?

Hirschhorn: No, it naturally addresses the viewers-quite directly in fact, just like the protesters that we see in demonstrations, where some group is protesting with signs or logos, or with shapes representing something. They claim they have no jobs, so they nail coffins together, right? Journalists demonstrate because somebody wants to impose a ban on reporting, so they fasten tape over their mouths. This is how their work addresses itself directly to the viewer, and it simply has nothing to do with the notion of sculpture, because these ideas of mass, form, and volume are simply not behind it any longer.

What I have tried to do is to put together different elements, pictures, forms, and photographs, so that they take on a substance that one can translate simply and directly. When I first made sculptures such as the Skulptur Sortier Station, I started quite simply with these logos, and gave a form to that material. But at the same time, of course, I also wanted to generate a certain resistance, because there is also work behind it; although you might now say it's not a great deal, my own work is in it. That is still important to me. So it is not only somehow an enlarged logo, it is some kind of homemade thing that someone created; it is a sculpted logo.

Buchloh: The Skulptur Sortier Station revealed two dimensions to me quite dramatically. Although they had appeared earlier in your work, I never saw them as clearly: the astonishing fact that your work as sculpture turned again and again to actual history, a feature that differentiates your work and sets it apart from previous generations of sculptors. For example, the fact that in the Skulptur Sortier Station-along with the corporate logos of Mercedes, for introduce a sudden glimpse of the DegenerateArt exhibition of example-you 1937 with the replica of the sculpture of Rudolf Haizmann.

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Throughout the 1960s and 1970s it was practically unthinkable that one could encounter a historical dimension or reflection in sculpture. Your work suddenly transported the spectator back into history, back, more precisely, to the political history of art. Yet you do not simply pay homage to figures of the past; you seem to want to facilitate a form of historical recollection in a present that no longer has any desire for historical memory, that even actively tries to suppress and eradicate it as much as possible.

Hirschhorn:Absolutely. That is my artistic responsibility, and I want to do that. But on the other hand this engagement is also ... it isn't a matter of history. It is a statement about what one finds important. And I am making that statement in forms that aren't my own because I feel altars are something we know, whose forms are familiar. This third dimension has nothing to do with the form of a sculpture but with some other form. And then there is something else that I want: it is, of course, an attack, a conscious one, on architecture, or on art in buildings, or on art in public space. Or on "immortal" art, in quotes-question mark, exclamation point.

Buchloh:This brings us straight to the next question, which concerns the typology of your sculptures, and one type in particular that you call your "altars."Your choices, the artists for whom you built altars, are relatively diverse in certain ways but in others are quite specific. Otto Freundlich,2 Robert Walser,3and Ingeborg Bachmann4 are very fragile, unusual figures in the history of modernism. Some of them, like Walser and Freundlich, were relatively unknown figures, and Bachmann is probably the least known of the three now. All three were highly complex, difficult, tragic artists. That can't be mere coincidence. Could you say something about those choices, or were they simply personal selections?

Hirschhorn:No, of course I can say something about it. But I should add that I didn't make an altar for Robert Walser,I made a "kiosk."That is an important difference to stress: the work for Robert Walser is a kiosk. There are four altars: one for Raymond Carver,5 the American writer; one for Piet Mondrian; one for Ingeborg Bachmann; and one for Otto Freundlich. Of course, Mondrian is in a sense a marginal figure as well, as a person, as an artist, as a loner. I selected figures about whom I could really say, "I love you," about whom I really meant it; it was a real commitment. And on the other Otto Freundlich (1878-1943), important early painter of abstraction, member of the Cologne 2.

Progressivists Group and later the group Abstraction/Creation in Paris before he was deported by the Nazi Occupation forces in Vichy France, perished in the Maidanek concentration camp.

3.

Robert Walser (1887-1956), the Swiss novelist and author of short stories, discovered by Walter Benjamin and considered as a naive counterfigure to Franz Kafka, committed himself to an asylum in order to be able to write.

4.

Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973), Austrian novelist and poet, major figure of postwar German literature, from the early sixties on lived in Rome, where she died in a fire in her home.

5.

Raymond Carver (1938-1988), American author who described the life of the lower middle class struggling to survive in the intensifying competition of postwar consumer culture.

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83

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hand, you're right, I selected them because of the tragic nature of their lives.

For example, I find reading Meine Schriften by Otto Freundlich really amazing.

But I could not say, "I love Picasso." Do you understand? That's something I cannot say. I respect his work, I suppose. But I can't say that.

Buchloh: His work has, of course, achieved such a position of authority and total acceptance. By contrast, your altars and kiosks set a certain process of recollection in motion with the figures that you foreground, and one is reminded of the difficulties of their situations. Yet your efforts at a resuscitation of their memory does not aim at a new cult of these artists. Rather, if one actually gets to know Ingeborg Bachmann, or one gets to know Robert Walser or Otto of our supposedly Freundlich, one gains a more complex understanding modernist history, and of what these artists were actually engaged with, and had to live through.

Hirschhorn: Absolutely. I agree. With Mondrian you don't end up with a star cult either. He is too rigid, or too low-maintenance. It doesn't work, and that's why I selected only these four figures, even though I wished of course that there could have been more. I am only making four monuments. Because, again, it is like a sheet of paper, when I have a plan and it has four corners.

There is room inside and out. It could in fact have been seven, or six, but I wanted it to be like a limitation of a plan. In that sense, four is enough.

Buchloh: That brings up an additional, important, and related question. You have developed a very precise typology. Within that, could you demarcate

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An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn

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the differences between a kiosk, an altar, and a monument? There are four monuments, four altars, and I don't know how many kiosks?

Hirschhorn: Eight. I can explain it to you. The first type, the four altars, are works for these four personalities in public space. Each can be exhibited and transplanted from one site to another. They always have to stand someplace outside. One is in a private collection.

Another is in a museum. The Carver for has been exhibited three times so far. altar, Raymond example, The Ingeborg Bachmann altar as been exhibited twice. The second type is the kiosk. There are eight kiosks, and they actually grew out of an "Art in Architecture" project at the University of Zurich. I proposed a project in the foyer of an institute for brain research for a limited period of time. I wanted to create a separate room that would be there for only six months, a kind of kiosk of the sort in prisons or in hospitals. You enter these so as not necessarily to be in one space but in another space. And I dedicated each of these kiosks to an artist, poet, or writer. These works no longer exist, as they were set up only for six months. The first one was dedicated to Robert Walser.

Then came Emmanuel Bove, the writer, then Fernand Leger, and then Ingeborg Bachmann got one as well. Then Meret Oppenheim got a kiosk.

Then came Otto Freundlich, he got one as well. And then there were two more-Emil Nolde, and Liubov Popova was the eighth one. A kiosk was simply a small place where information could be found about this artist, about his or her work. And it was important for me to know that the information about them was present and accessible in these kiosks for a limited period of time.

And then the third type of work is the monument. The monument is different because it requires the help of neighbors; it is created with the assistance of other people. And I actually want to make four monuments, even though I have only completed three so far. The first three were for the philosophers Spinoza, Deleuze, and Bataille; and the fourth one will be for Gramsci. And these are also public works, but they reflect something of the local area, or residents, because they are more complex and larger. The Spinoza monument in Amsterdam was the smallest. We only had to find a sex shop in the city's red-light district whose proprietor would allow us to install the monument in front of his shop and provide the electricity. That was the most modest monument.

Buchloh: You actually conceive of sculpture more as an event, rather than as an object, let alone a monument?

Hirschhorn: Absolutely. That was very important; that is what I wanted. I wanted this cluster of meanings, since it is many things-not only a sculpture but also a meeting place.

Buchloh: What then is the difference between sculpture as "event" and sculpture as spectacle? Isn't that a dangerous proximity?

Hirschhorn: No, no danger at all. Because my monument produces something, it generates something. That is the intention, at least; it is not just to be looked

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at, but you participate. In fact, "participation" can be a person sitting at the bar and drinking beer. In Kassel, for example, it was important that the Bataille Monument included a bar and a snack counter. Not because it is important that people refresh themselves, or eat or drink, but because it presented a chance for conversation or a place to meet. This actually happens with my monuments: people often sit there, drinking beer, and I wanted to emphasize that aspect. For that reason my monuments aren't spectacles for me but rather events. An event is also something you can't plan ahead of time because you never know what will happen. And in fact that is what happened. If I already know in advance what kind of experience will be generated, it wouldn't be an event, it wouldn't be an experience.

I feel that the condition of spectacle always results from thinking of an event in terms of two groups, one that produces something and another that looks at it. That was not the case here. And it is possible to create an event that will be so difficult and complicated and incredibly exhausting that it will alwaysmake excessive demands on the spectator. The first to be overburdened was me, the next were my coworkers, or the people from the housing project, and then perhaps the third, I hope, was the visitor. In this sense I believe that if there is such constant challenge, one can fend off the spectacle. And naturally part of the challenge is that it is limited in duration.

Buchloh: One of the criticisms raised of your work, especially in regard to your Bataille Monument,was that it pretended to communicate with a local audience in a way that could actually never happen. Is the mere intention or the actuality of communication a criterion for you to evaluate the success of your work ?

Hirschhorn:That is very easy to answer. First, I didn't want to exclude anyone. I find that anyone who thinks that local Muslim kids could not get involved with Bataille makes a huge mistake. I reject that strongly. That would mean that someone was excluded from the outset, for what reason I don't know. Why should they be shut out? Why would anybody say they can't handle it? I don't buy that. Sadly,it is precisely this argument that frequently comes from a leftist position. If I say I want to make a work for a collectivepublic, then I am obliged to, and it is my desire to make a work in which I don't ever exclude anyone.

Buchloh:Yet it seems that you quite deliberately set up the most extreme confrontations. A Bataille monument in a Turkishworkers' housing project in Germany, or a Spinoza monument in Amsterdam's red-light district: those are sites that create the extreme confrontations that are important for the understanding of your work. If you had placed a Spinoza monument in the inner courtyard of Amsterdam University,it would have been less interesting...

Hirschhorn:Of course-absolutely. I am the artist, and when I work in an open space I decide where to place my work. It interests me that my work has to defend itself in any surroundings, in any sector, and fight for its autonomy.

That is another dimension that is very important to me.

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Buchloh:But that in itself is a rather utopian assumption, isn't it?

Hirschhorn:I hope it is not a utopian one, of course, but I would say that it is a radical, nonexclusive stance. It is a political stance, although of course this is not political art. What I keep saying is precisely that I want to make my work political in the sense that I do not exclude anyone. Then there is another argument I try to make very clear (and I realize that there are misunderstandings): the first aim of the Bataille monument was to generate friendship and social interaction, and the second goal was to provide an opportunity to learn something about Georges Bataille. I have argued, for example, that when someone sits next to the monument, he or she beomes a part of the monument. And, strictly speaking, when children are playing in the TV studio, or making films about their own reality, that is then a part of the Bataille monument as well. There was not a single book in the library by or about Georges Bataille, but books on the themes of Georges Bataille, because I wanted it to go beyond him. And ultimately I never talked to the youngsters I worked with about Georges Bataille. What I wanted instead was to foreground a certain dimension of the work of Georges Bataille, where he talks of "la perte," or loss-where he talks about being stretched beyond one's limits, where he talks about something transcendent. It is possible that, in the end, Georges Bataille's name and his work could be replaced by others.

Buchloh:So when people talk about a failure to communicate is that altogether false?

Hirschhorn: I try to make this issue very concrete. That is why I said that my presence on the site was not required for communication or discussion with people, but simply in the role of a caretaker, to check that everything was functioning.

Buchloh:One might still misunderstand you, and argue that you benevolently overlook the actual conditions of total alienation and reification that govern the everyday life of the Turkish working class in Germany. Worse yet, one could argue that you assume that their fundamentally alienated living and working conditions could be improved with relative ease, through spontaneous acts of understanding, reading, communication, and exchange. That-for better or worse-is the utopian dimension of your work. From a less utopian, but more pragmatically political position, one would argue that under such conditions it is impossible to generate communication and understanding with aesthetic tools alone. Isn't it highly improbable, for example, that Spinoza will suddenly become an event, right in the middle of Amsterdam's red-light district? What do you say to such critics?

Hirschhorn:Nothing is impossible with art. Nothing.

Buchloh:Ah, yes, that is the type of conviction that emerged from the Beuys tradition, right? Warhol would have said the opposite: that nothing is possible with art, nothing but business.

Hirschhorn:The other possibility is that by letting this autonomy shine through, by

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holding fast to this affirmation of art, I want people to think, to reflect, okay?

That is what I want: reflection about my work, art in general, the passage of time, the world, reality. It is possible, for example, to talk with Turkish kids about art, because I don't talk with them as a social worker but as an artist, as someone who believes in art. And those are the points for me that are extremely important, and I believe that art makes such activity possible. I am not here to rehabilitate anyone, or not to rehabilitate them. That is not my job. I quite clearly reject that. At the same time I find a cynical stance impossible, because it creates no autonomy or activity for me.

Buchloh:But why could you not also depart from the critical and cynical potential of art, with its own subversive dimension? What about, for example, that aspect in the Warhol tradition that goes back to Francis Picabia?

Hirschhorn:Well, with Picabia I have to wonder. With Duchamp, for example, I could even say that I love him. Not Picabia. That is quite clear. Not Picasso either. It is not about morals or anything. That's not the issue; I don't like moralizing. But of course I like to argue, to get engaged, and I feel that art makes that possible. Naturally my work raises an incredible number of questions. There is criticism, and I don't try to avoid it. But the argument isn't theoretical, I feel. That is a major difference. My work is something that I feel, that I have to make. I, Thomas Hirschhorn, simply, really, not only will make a statement theoretically but will also attempt to sustain this statement in reality. I can then say, for example, that when I maintain that art is not about communication, that is true, because I have not created any kind of communication. But I was there in the field and have tried to defend art and uphold its autonomy.

Buchloh:When you say that you truly believe in the possibilities of art, then I start to wonder where the intensely subversive, antiaesthetic dimension of your work originates? Your work generates a continuous dialectic between aesthetic and antiaesthetic impulses, emphasizing disintegration as much as construction. For example, if you suddenly align sculpture with the forms and processes of spontaneously erected, collective altars in which people's emotions are haplessly manipulated, you seem to affirm a resurgence of ritual and cult value in sculptural experience in the present. Such a strategy appears as an incredible assault, a slap in the face of all modernist and postmodernist sculpture. Does your belief in art comprise this critical antiaesthetic, or is that merely a contradiction?

Hirschhorn: No, that isn't a contradiction. For me, you see, there is no high and low art, or...

Buchloh:But objectively they exist, right? That is a contrast that we all have to deal with. Perhaps it doesn't exist for you, but socially it certainly does. We have not resolved the conflicts between mass culture and high culture. Not even Andy Warhol was able to do that.

Hirschhorn:I too will have trouble doing away with it. But believe me, I am not in

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89

this to fight a lost cause. And I am not in this to shore up something that has already been established.

I want to work on this notion of an exalted high art, a plus-value,which doesn't come from one's own mental activity but from history, which somehow derives from external values. I question that, and I criticize that. And that is why I create my work with my own materials. That is very important to me. I am not in this to say from the outset that I won't make it, but rather to say that it is possible to work with incredibly, you could even say miserable-not only discouraging, but miserable-and truly modest results. I try to give form to my ideas. And if I am to give them the kind of form I want, I have to work with materials that everybody knows. They have no special value, and they suggest something other than what I am using them for. It's not a matter of antiaesthetics; in truth I could force the issue and say that I find these materials beautiful. It is not about that; it is a matter of a different purpose. If a woman puts tape around her suitcase because she fears that it might burst open, she doesn't think about whether it looks nice. She simply wants to fix something that presents a problem to her. And she thereby creates a form, or uses the materials that interest me for what is actually needed: energy. Not Beuysian energy, but energy in the sense of something that connects people, that can connect you with others. And certainly not quality, which-and now that you speak of high art-wants to separate us, to divide us. Because there are only very few people, after all (and as a Swiss, I know something about this) who can afford quality, who can afford quality judgments in general. And I loathe that, and oppose it, because it shuts out the vast majority of all the rest simply, quite simply, because they can't afford it.

Buchloh:Do you consider yourself to be a Marxist?

I am, but it would be presumptuous of me to say "Iam a Marxist,"because Hirschhorn: I haven't studied it, because I haven't thought about it in any academic way.

And also, you understand, because I don't want to. I believe that as an artist, I want to make my work political, to be responsible for each of my actions. And there are many actions for which I am responsible that aren't any good, but I want to be responsible for every act that has to do with my work. That interests me. Declaring myself to be a Marxist, translating this theory into practice, would also limit me. For example, in the question of my public, of whom I address. You see? I deliberately eliminate that specific question. I admit that one could criticize that elimination, but it's not naivete, and it's not that I haven't thought about it. But it's an element that, if I wish to be active, and I do, if I want to make something, if I want to give something, I have to eliminate that type of specificity.

Buchloh:Since I started with a question that was odd I'd like to end this conversation with a question that is equally odd: a proposal to project your simultaneous enthusiasm for Warhol and Beuys back into history, and to ask

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whether you also initially had to choose between your love for Alexandr Rodchenko and your love for Kurt Schwitters?

Hirschhorn:As was the case with Warhol and Beuys, there is no "either or." I love them equally, and they were both on my scarves. I've never been afraid of contradictions because we are here to generate them, not smooth them away. I feel that there is a certain energy in contradictions. I love Schwitters for the explosive force that you still see in his work today. But I love him more specifically for the fact that he built the Merzbauthree times, against incredible resistance and with unimaginable, admirable persistence. I knew Rodchenko's work quite well, at first from his graphic design. After all, he was the artist who, after painting wonderful pictures and making fabulous photographs, made extraordinary posters and graphic design, but also made clothes for workers. He ignored all of these divisions and media restrictions.

Buchloh: If one were to formulate the relationship between Rodchenko and Schwitters as an antithetical situation, one could say that Rodchenko articulated what could have become subjects in a utopian socialist society, and Schwitters collected the shambles of bourgeois subjectivity, of what had actually been left. But you seem to be neither concerned with what is left to us, nor naively preoccupied with a utopian transformation of the world through design. Just as in the earlier opposition between Warhol and Beuys, you inhabit a third position, one that creates both travesty and subversion while simultaneously inducing historical reflection. I tried to describe earlier how this explicitly historical, not to say mnemonic, dimension in your work insists on a critical reflection of history (in sculpture, of all places). Thus-unlike Warhol-it figures itself in manifest opposition to the enforced amnesia of an advanced consumer culture that increasingly annihilates historical experience altogether. Does that seem somewhat accurate?

Hirschhorn: Absolutely.

Buchloh: What one can recognize

in Schwitters's

Merzbau, his Cathedral of Erotic

Misery,is that memory emerges literally from collecting the discarded remnants of the everyday, from uncovering obsolete objects and materials. This sense of obsolescence provides us with a memory space that still appears to be accessible, even in late capitalist society. Rodchenko of course articulates precisely the opposite, since he compensates for the forgetting of the present moment through the opening of the utopian dimension, by creating something new and radical in which a truly free experience might be possible. This dimension and perspective, however, can surely no longer be credited to design in our society. Although design still interests you a great deal, right?

Hirschhorn:Yes. One ought to add that when looking at Rodchenko, I recognized for the first time that failure is not the issue. Schwitters was already clearly a solitary figure, maintaining his ideesfixe, and his stance of a refusal to suffer but instead to simply carry on.

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Buchloh: One feature of your exceptional book Les plaintifs, les bites, les politiques that has always intrigued me is its specific referral to various design coventions.6 For example, at one point the book invokes Rodchenko's Constructivist/Productivist design, from the moment when it had devolved state socialism. In another into propaganda for Stalin's authoritarian moment, often side by side with the first, you cite modernist design, which in its own tragic history, in certain instances, suddenly became fascist. Or, just as often, you make references to contemporary corporate design, such as your favorite Chanel advertisement, or to cigarette and perfume ads. When you approach these logos and design languages, you often pose questions in what seems to be a rhetoric of false naivete, or perhaps more accurately, a Brechtian dialectic: "I don't know what it is, but I love this." You confront yourself with the catastrophic outcome of what was once a utopian design culture, and admit that you cannot resist its seduction anymore than anybody else can. You ask the question, "Why can't I detach myself, and simply state that these are regimes of control and strategies of domination?"

Hirschhorn: That's very good. I can assure you that no one has formulated that as you have, of course, and you have already spoken about this book and its contents two or three times. That has helped me tremendously and also helped my work. The book was published in 1995, which means that I made those works in 1993 and 1994. I was trying to settle accounts, in a way.

Buchloh: With your own past?

Hirschhorn: Exactly, and especially with my past as a graphic designer. But when I confront such things as the Chanel design, I simply have to say, "Good, no one could do it better, this type and everything. That can't be improved upon." At a certain point defiance is no longer possible. That is why I also have to say programmatically, "Quality no, energy yes!"Because there are in fact certain pretensions of quality. Our eyes function in such and such a way...

Buchloh: In such a way that we cannot defy authority?

Hirschhorn: Yes, precisely. If you cannot defy it by addressing it head-on, or attacking it, then other forms have to be found, that clearly indicate that quality doesn't affect or interest me. And I tried to do that with Les plaintifs, les bites, les politiques: to take seriously this tightness, this simplistic blandness. I take it seriously myself, and quite simply accept it, this first degre.

Buchloh: There is a counterforce to the allures of design in your work in your that one could call an excess of information, strategies of accumulation materials, and objects. It seems that Georges Bataille's concept plays a major role in your work and is evident in this endless overload of objects and information, of accumulations which lead to devaluation. It seems as though you wanted to confront viewers with the necessity of recognizing the chaotic 6.

The book Lesplaintifs, les betes,lespolitiqueswas published by the Centre genevois de gravure contemporaine in 1995.

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multiplicity and urgency of your questions, and at the same time to foil their attempts at coming to terms with them. Could you say something more about the concept of "excess"?

Hirschhorn: Yes, absolutely. If philosophers interest me, Bataille is definitely one of them. Philosophers help me in my life. When I first encountered Bataille's concept of expenditure, I had the feeling that I had never read such a thing before, and I instantly felt in total agreement with that. This assertiveness, of constant acts of giving and challenging others-that is what I wanted to do in my work. And that is what Georges Bataille also describes in his book La Part maudite. This idea of the potlatch is based on challenging others by giving, so that they reciprocate with an offering to me. This motive is very important in my work: I want to make a lot, give a lot. And when I say give-in the sense of "giving form," not making form but giving form-I want to do that in order to challenge the other people, the viewers, to get equally involved, so that they also have to give. I always have the feeling that I am still making too little. There is too little there. It is still not dense enough, and I want it to be dense. I want it loaded.

Also, it is very important to me that the gallery space is not simply a white cube-after all, who can afford empty white spaces? I don't want any white spaces! This luxury, I realized, is no longer something merely expensive; it is something that doesn't exist. These empty white spaces rarify objects to intimidate the viewer. For that very reason it is very important to me that my work always have a lot of elements, a lot of material.

Buchloh: It always struck me that your work's excessive accumulations of pictures, objects, and structures mimetically followed the actual governing principles of overproduction and the technologies of incessantly multiplying meaningless images. If one compares your stance with the original historical context and concept of Duchamp's singular readymades, one recognizes a totally different quantitative and temporal dimension in the present day, in which images and objects proliferate and invade us by the thousands at every turn we take.

Hirschhorn: Absolutely, I agree. I would also like to say something else that is not frequently understood. I don't believe in the superiority of the single image because I know that the single image is utilized as a tool of exerting power.

Let's take the example of 9/11-this single image of the collapsing towers, and the resulting ruins-and how this single image wants to have power over me. Although we know perfectly well that there are ruins in Grozny, and that there are ruins in Palestine, and that there are ruins all over the world, this picture alone claims to have the greatest power over me. I want to combat this power by producing a huge number of other images.

Buchloh:Your accumulations of images then induce a process of decentralization ...

Hirschhorn: Exactly. Not necessarily contradictory pictures, but rather showing the same thing from completely different perspectives ...

Buchloh: What impressed me so much when I saw your Airport Worldfor the first time

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in Chicago was the fact that the sheer quantity of information forced spectators to give up their desire for the false monolithic centrality of a traditionally conceived and unified work. But perhaps more important, one was also forced to see the existing political links between objects, stories, structures, and situations. Your work suddenly dispelled not only the monolithic isolation of a traditional work, but it also opened up a global way of reading and recognizing relations between phenomena that were previously disconnected and hidden.

Hirschhorn:I am in fact concerned that this mass of information might have previously appeared as unrelated. Obviously, I do not only make political statements and assume responsibility; I also want to achieve a sculptural impact. Therefore, I work with and create forms that reflect how I experience the world, how I am forced to confront reality, and how I understand the age in which I am living. For me, that means first of all to not create any spaces where one can stand back and maintain distance. Second, it means not to set up any kinds of hierarchies. Third, it means to break through onedimensional relationships, to try to split up centered vantage points, and to make singular viewpoints impossible. To get back to the work that you are talking about: it is for these reasons that the connections are so important for me. They don't necessarily have to be real connections, although in the AirportWorldthey were real.

Buchloh:By establishing these seemingly infinite relations and offering an excess of information, your "displays"deny any hierarchical mode of experience. If, for example, one simultaneously encountered a work by Richard Serra and a work by Thomas Hirschhorn in a sculpture exhibition, one would recognize immediately that Serra's work requires a highly specialized, knowledgeable way of experiencing sculpture. It presumes an extremely differentiated phenomenological approach, one ultimately based on an aesthetic of autonomy. Your work instead sabotages all these appeals to autonomy: the whole discursive system of what could be called sculpture is twisted, spun around, and opened to a whole new array of contexts and contiguities.

Hirschhorn: Quite right. The wonderful thing about art is that positions like Richard Serra's are possible, but my position is also possible. That is why I love art. I don't work against Richard Serra. Rather he and other artists work so intensely and radically on their own system that I say, "If he does that, I'll have to demand that of myself as well." That is my job, my mission, as an artist: to make this my own work. But it interests me that there are other positions. My position is not in combat with them, but my position wants to assert itself and clearly maintain its ideas and content.

Buchloh:You mean your work does not engage in a critical dialogue with prevailing notions of public sculpture? Does your work not somehow state that certain sculptural concepts of publicness are false? Doesn't your work give us a much more complex definition of the conditions of public space?

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Hirschhorn: Absolutely! I think every artist has this intention.

Otherwise one couldn't carry on. But for me, for example, the concept of the sublime is one that I despise as being profoundly bourgeois.

Buchloh: So your work wants to desublimate? And excess is an important strategy in your project of sculptural desublimation?

Hirschhorn: Absolutely. This is the direction I have taken, and the path I wish to follow. Although people keep saying, "Those are installations," I don't make installations, you understand? I make my kind of work because I don't want people to be able to step back from it. I want people to be inside my work, and I want spectators to be a part of this world surrounding them in this moment. Then they have to deal with it. That is why it looks the way it does.

Buchloh: It seems there are actually three types of objects and materials that turn up in your larger displays. First, there are the real objects. Then there are the enlarged objects, made of aluminum foil or whatever, which magnify trivial objects of everyday life such as watches, spoons, or mushrooms. Last there are these abstract forms that are often made with tape or aluminum foil, uncanny bulbous rhizomes or biomorphic links that roam through your displays. And that is a remarkable spectrum. First of all, it seems to expressly refer to specific sculptural practices and conventions. One cannot see a giant object, let's say your Rolex watches, without thinking of the strategies of Claes Oldenburg. Magnifying trivial objects is by now a well-established strategy invented by the greatest sculptor of the 1960s. But you turn that around, and this strategy suddenly generates precisely the opposite effect: the enlargement does not monumentalize the trivial object anymore, but forces it back into the banality from which it originated. At the same time you deploy these cheap materials like duct tape and all kinds of foil to sculpt these forms of almost threatening growth. And these opposstalactite/stalagmite ing strategies really bring about a decisive effect of desublimation.

Hirschhorn: I'm very touched that you see so clearly what I have in mind with the of these objects, for example with a book. I am not conmagnifications cerned with any book in particular. I want to say: every book is important, every book can be important. But no one book is more important than any other; I'm not placing it above something else in a kind of hierarchy.

Buchloh: But in contrast to Pop art, you not only work with the objectsof the everyday; you mobilize the actual everyday practices and experiences of other of those collective people. Let us consider your Altars once more-citations forms of behavior in which people spontaneously generate such structures.

And in other works, for example the sculptures that deal with the task of removal, where you also perform a common social gesture, virtually the opposite of your principle of excessive accumulation: namely to get rid of excess material, to throw something away, and then turn it into your own sculptural strategy.

Hirschhorn: I want to make truly a poor art. Poor art, not arte povera. That it is the

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one thing I wanted to say to you. Something else regarding Oldenburg: I do not have any problem at all with this comparison, but what is very important to me is that even when I enlarge something it is never monumental. That is my only criticism of Oldenburg's art objects in public space: they naturally become monuments.

Buchloh:Monuments to what, one has to ask oneself.

Hirschhorn:Exactly. That is the only question that is interesting. And in these cases, the monument itself is not criticized, and nor does the work call the underlying concepts of public space into question. That is one of the reasons why I have always tried to enlarge my work myself, by hand. Even though it is large, it is never monumental, never simply magnified by some method. And to go back one more time to this question of poverty,and of Filliou: Filliou introduced these strategies of subtraction, of clearing away, as you put it.

Accordingly, all the materials that I use are not only used in the realm of art.

Every time I work with a given element, I try to check whether there are possibilities of linking it with a reality that exists elsewhere. I have always tried to make this bridge to something that has a reality elsewhere. That is very important to me.

Buchloh:There is another dialectic that your work engages with from the very beginning, namely to isolate existing social rituals, or to refer to cult behavior in mass culture-let us say soccer-and to intertwine these forms of experience with phenomena derived from avant-garde culture. Writing Rodchenko's name in applique on a soccer scarf is a great example of that strategy.

On the one hand, you seem to recognize that one cannot remove the cultic dimension from everyday industrial mass culture, and that cult behavior continues to define our experience no matter how enlightened we like to think we are. On the other hand, artistic practices that had once consistently opposed myth and cult (and that was certainly one of Rodchenko's most important demands), that had subverted ritual, have long since become part of a new cult-like veneration. That is an insight flashing up from the short circuit established in your SoccerScarves.

But something else becomes evident as well: namely that you take those actual forms of desire, or the hopes that express themselves in such masscultural cult forms, very seriously, and that you want to establish a dialogue with these forms of ritual. Instead of considering them only as abject forms of extreme alienation, you take them seriously as possible forms of collective self-expression. Thus, you deal with the mass-cultural object not only iconographically,as Pop art did, but you actually engage with the given experiential conditions that such mass-cultural objects feed upon.

Hirschhorn:Yes, I simply believe that there are in fact certain everyday forms, as you have just described, that are in themselves incredibly expressive. Now, I am naturally interested in this seemingly uncreative process, because it is about reproducing something...

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An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn

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98

Buchloh:... or creating a memory structure in the seemingly uncreative process.

Hirschhorn: Quite right, to create history. This form interests me tremendously because I believe that there is an explosive force in it, like dynamite.

Although it is a weak notion, I would say in fact that it is something that resists!

Buchloh: Now that is an important question. Is it weak, or is it alienated, or is it

deformed by mass culture?

Hirschhorn: I would say it is "weak." In the sense of Robert Walser, you understand.

Buchloh: Robert Walser and Robert Filliou perhaps have a great deal more in common than their first name ...

Hirschhorn: Of course. And in Walser you are drawn into this current where you no longer know what is weak and what is strong. There is a certain resistance inherent in his work, and I like that a lot. After all, he even explicitly says that it is the weak who think of themselves as strong. Or, simply, that the weak are actually strong, because the strong are actually weak. And he places himself in a certain "weak" position. Naturally I find that this has an explosive force, a kind of resistance despite our mass culture's actual lack of resistance. I am personally very susceptible to these forms, for example these little altars that are generated outside and inside by all kinds of fans. These are manifestations that are not a matter of strength or weakness, but in which form is given to a particular concern, and that is what matters, and that touches me.

Buchloh: Or it means taking the forms given by others seriously, or using these display forms as the matrix for one's own creation of form.

Hirschhorn: I take them very seriously, and I believe in their innate form. Or I think these are forms too, even though I don't believe in them exclusively.

They participate in some kind of resistance, but, I mean, what or who resists anyway? Really not many. And most important, they still give evidence of something that we are losing, a relation or an object that is perceived with love-perhaps wrongly.

Buchloh: Or rather, what is left of the ability to love. One more question about removal. This happens in your work not only on the level of materials, but in many of your displays. The removal of boundaries occurs between public and private space, and also between art space and ordinary space, as in your pavilions in Muinster, or in the work in Lyon. Both were set up with the express intent to be accessible twenty-four hours per day, which de facto implied that they would be subject to theft and vandalism. Since you do not want to accept a traditional protective boundary between art space and public space, the erasure of that boundary inevitably entails that the work is damaged or vandalized. Could you say something about that ?

Hirschhorn: Of course. As a matter of fact, I have produced a lot of exhibitions in museums and galleries, but also in public spaces. What interests me, after all, is precisely not to distinguish between public space and the museum or some other private space. What interests me is that it is always the same potential

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public, only the proportion is different. For in the museum there are people who afterward go out onto the street. People who go into a museum are, let us say, fundamentally interested in art, perhaps, or perhaps have some time for art. By contrast, on the street, my work confronts the anonymous passerby, people who are not necessarily preoccupied with art. And that interests me. But I don't say there is a public-I'm not an advertising man, after all. I don't say that this is a target public or that is a target public. That would be totally wrong. But I would like to create conditions with the materials, the way I create the work, and the theme, of course, which make as many as possible feel included. Or that no one, in any case, feels excluded.

And that inclusion is also my intention for my new project here in Paris. It is called the Musee Precaire Albinet. I want to make a museum, a precarious or temporary museum, with young people and the residents of a housing project in the peripherienear where I live.

The proposition is, of course, once again that art has the ability to change the world. And I chose eight artists for the project. Once a week an original work by one of these eight artists will be lent to us by the Centre Georges Pompidou-an original Mondrian painting, for example, a Beuys, a a a Malevich, Corbusier, a Duchamp. An original work from each of Leger, these artists will be exhibited for a week in a small museum in front of this low-income housing project, the HLM. But the exhibition is not everything; it will be accompanied by an atelier d'criture, and there will be debates, a conference, an atelier for children, and a small bar for adults.

My idea is that the work of art, and in particular an original work of is not only a valuable object, not only patrimoine, but that it also retains art, an active dynamic element. For example, we will exhibit the Pompidou Center's original large Electric Chair by Andy Warhol. And starting from that, we can perhaps raise questions about the death penalty, and beyond that, the question of justice, and then issues currently very much in the news in France (for example, the debate concerning the foulard, and the question of independent communities, and so on). We will also be exhibiting, for example, Le Corbusier's gorgeous maquette for the Cite Radieuse ...

Buchloh: The mother of all HLMs. Hirschhorn:Yes. And this discussion about public housing should naturally be carried out in the project. Because they are living in public housing, but not in the way that Le Corbusier had anticipated it. And at the same time we will organize excursions and events with the young people. In other words, there will be an active element. We are not primarily interested in the patrimoine, the merely passive element, where value keeps increasing. By contrast, we will be focusing on what a work retains in itself, if anything, and what can be reactivated. Of course, let me repeat it: the proposition is that art wants to change the world, or that the world wants to change with art or through art.

Buchloh: Do you know the work of Michael Asher?

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Hirschhorn: Yes, of course.

Buchloh: He produced a very interesting work two years ago that you probably don't know, because it has not been published at all. When he was asked to develop a proposal for a work for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Asher invited a class from one of L.A.'s largest public high schools, in which 120 different languages are spoken, to work with him. Once he engaged with this school class, he asked them to study one of the galleries of the museum's collection that displayed Surrealists and American Abstract Expressionists.

Eventually he suggested that they reinstall the works according to their own points of view, their own criteria. Your approach seems to be somewhat similar, since these schoolchildren, who were twelve, fourteen, fifteen years old, had never seen any art in this or any other way, since most of them had never gone to a museum.

Hirschhorn:I like Michael Asher. This straightforwardness, this clarity, but also this trust in art. This autonomy, this I-simply-look-at-that-and-have-to-deal-with-it.

This not necessarily wanting to communicate totally, that I like a lot.

Buchloh: When will your Musee Precaire take place?

Hirschhorn: From April 17 to June 15. The reason I was talking about it was because I am trying, for example,

to create a connection

to the museum.

And now, twelve of the young people have classes in the Pompidou Center.

They can go there, go inside and work there, and they are even being paid from our budget. And that interests me, to make this exhibition there, in front of this housing development. And it should be with and for the people from the project primarily. Why not?

-Paris, December 19, 2003

Another Geometry: Gego's Reticuldrea, 1969-1982

MONICA AMOR

For Lucas

What is this image? As it has no value, it has nothing obscure; as it has no meaning, it has no top or bottom, right or left; as it has no density, it is superficial, which is to say geographical and not geological; and as it has no center, its boundaries are nowhere, for any scansion would allow for meaning to emergeand would constitute objectsand singularities through discontinuity. In short, it is an open surface in thepure light of weightlessness.

-Bernard

Cache, Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories

Only the increasingly calligraphic quality of Gego's (Gertrud Goldschmidt, 1912-1994) work and her interest in experimental engineering prepares us for the radical leap performed by her Reticuldrea, which was first exhibited in June 1969 at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas. The work, made of meshes and nets of metal connected and dispersed irregularly within the space of a room, was titled by Venezuelan art critic Roberto Guevara prior to its first exhibition. The Spanish word "reticula," as in the English "reticule," refers to a network of lines or a net; therefore, Reticuldreaalludes to an area of nets.

The Reticuldrea, I will argue in this essay, rehearsed an artistic paradigm of production that in its refusal of the conventions of sculpture (mass, volume, scale) made line and space the means for a critique of architectural enclosure and sculptural monumentality. In its systematic undoing of the calculated geometries and gridlike structures favored by Venezuelan artists at the time, the work interrogated these idealized models of representation and their illusory reflection of a modernized urban space. Gego's "weaving," as she called the process of production OCTOBER113, Summer2005, pp. 101-25. ? 2005 OctoberMagazine,Ltd. and MassachusettsInstituteof Technology.

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that the design of the Reticuldrea implied, was part and parcel of the constructive ethics that had fueled the country's artistic imaginary in the fifties but which, by the late sixties, was domesticated by the government and the economic elite as a symbol of the country's riches. Gego's Reticuldrea, in its attack on form and architectural demarcation, went against the grain of standard sculptural bodies (delimited, contained, and massive) to engage marginal spaces, such as the peripheries of rooms that she was at pains to activate in her installations, and to symbolically respond to the repressed borderline sites occupied by the shantytowns of Caracas.

A niece of the medieval art historian Adolph Goldschmidt, who taught the likes of Alexander Dorner, Erwin Panofsky, and Rudolph Wittkover at the of Berlin, University Gego studied architecture and engineering at the Technische Hochschule under the tutelage of Paul Bonatz.1 With this double degree, from one of the few institutions among Germany's polytechnics that structured its curriculum as an architecture school, the young Gego, a native of Hamburg, arrived in Caracas in August 1939. Gego's artistic development is intimately related to her architectural and engineering training in Stuttgart, the latter predisposing her toward an architectural reading of sculptural space. Intellectually influenced by the polemics surrounding the downfall of modern architecture and avant-garde culture in Nazi Germany, Gego was eager to embrace a sculptural practice prepared to recapture, and later redefine, sculpture's use of real, i.e., architectural, space, and to develop an acute awareness of the urban contradictions of the built environment. It seems logical that at some point her work would go beyond the simple object to engage more complex situations that, as in architecture, would develop modes of public address in which viewers collectively confronted a spawhich tiotemporal field organized according to the matrix of dedifferentiation, one also recognizes in the post-Minimalist work of Robert Morris and Eva Hesse, whose Right After (1969) came to fruition the same year as the Reticuldrea.

It has often been observed that Gego's Reticuldrea bears the influence of American engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller, particularly of his geodesic domes. Already in 1969, Venezuelan art critic and historian Lourdes Blanco, in her short but insightful text on Gego's Reticulcrea, mentioned Buckminster Fuller and Alexander Calder as influential antecedents for the work.2 Engineering, like architecture, was for Gego (and a whole generation of artists in the sixties) a with and experiments compelling field in which radical reconceptualizations 1.

Gego registered in the department of architecture of the Technische Hochschule of Stuttgart in the winter semester of 1932-33. Bonatz was one of the main exponents of the modernist masonry style that developed in Germany between the wars. He had been influenced by Theodor Fischer's masonry buildings and had put in practice a modernized version of his teacher's style in the railroad station of Stuttgart, which he constructed in collaboration with F. E. Scholer from 1911 to 1928. But Bonatz also favored rather traditional forms and methods of construction. He was a major advocate of the socalled Heimatstil, which derived from the rural German vernacular architecture of the nineteenth century. Bonatz is also known to have opposed the neoclassicism of the Nazi regime, which he regarded as pompous and ornamental, and is best remembered for the bridges that he constructed for the National Socialist government.

Lourdes Blanco, Gego:Reticularea (Caracas: Ediciones de la Galeria Conkright, 1969).

2.

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urban space were taking place. Fuller's masterpiece, a geodesic dome seventy-six meters in diameter constructed on the occasion of the 1967 Universal Exhibition in Montreal for the American Pavilion (and of which Gego was probably aware), embodied a "futuristic optimism"3 directly connected to the new structural and spatial challenges of the period. The geodesic domes, along with other proposals and engineering techniques which focused on lightweight structures that counteracted the tendency toward industrial standardization and institutionalized functionalism of the postwar period, were widely publicized in architectural magazines during the fifties and sixties. In 1962, when Gego was traveling in the United States and Europe studying various pedagogical programs for the first year of architectural school,4 Andre Bloc, editor of L'architecture d'aujourd'hui-who had written widely about Carlos Rail Villanueva's City University, where Gego was a an issue on "Architectures Fantastiques." professor of architecture-published The magazine featured many experimental projects which reconceived the city dweller's relationship to the urban metropolis. The projects shared a fluid conception of space that circumvented the corporate functionalism that had developed within modern architecture and urbanism. All of them, according to architectural historian MarkWigley, were indebted to the pioneering work of Buckminster Fuller and Konrad Waschmann.5And indeed, given the fact that Gego's Reticuldreais not meant to enclose or cover space as geodesic domes do, it is tempting to find in Gego's work a stronger affinity with Waschmann's large "metal space-frames"of the early fifties.

Predicated on a modulated system based on standardized elements that allow for multiple combinations, Waschmann's structures are articulated on the basis of a node (called "universal connector") situated around a main member. From a ring, up to twenty secondary tubes can radiate in any combination of all directions, allowing for an unlimited adaptability to all possible geometric systems.6An analogous where she attached metal rods connecting device was used by Gego in the Reticuldrea, in a to a for articulations.

Furthermore, the ending loop large ring, allowing pliant infinite modularity and open quality of Waschmann's "space-frames"also resemble, more than the geodesic domes do, the logic of Gego's work.

But if these spatial experiments in engineering provided Gego with material to 3.

Antoine Picon, ed., L'Artde l'ingenieur,constructeur,entrepeneur,inventeur(Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), p. 152.

4.

Between 1958 and 1967, Gego taught the basic course in art, and later the workshop for basic composition, at the school of architecture of the Central University in Caracas. From 1964 to 1977 she was professor at the Institute of Design, Neumann Foundation. There she taught courses on "bidimensional and three-dimensional form" and "spatial solutions." At the Institute, between 1971 and 1977, she devoted great efforts to develop a seminar on spatial relations, which culminated in two important publications: Space, Volume,Organization,published by the Neumann Foundation in 1976, and Space,Volume,and Organization,vol. 2, edited by Monteavila Editores in 1979.

5.

Mark Wigley, Constant'sNew Babylon:The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (Rotterdam: Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, 1998), p. 41.

6.

Konrad Wachsmann, The Turning Point of Building: Structureand Design (New York: Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1961), p. 172.

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develop her (anti-) sculptural practice, which she defined in relation to its dismissal of volume and mass, she circumvented their spectacularity, grandiosity, structural precision, functional efficiency, and industrial optimism through of strategies precariousness that bespoke the contradictions of technology. It was through drawing, a medium which, in art as in architecture, is associated with preliminarity, that she was able to break free from the containment of the

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sculptural object.

Indeed, Gego seems to have found in the endless iterability of the line the basis for an alternative artistic practice in which the ideality of geometric abstraction, enthusiastically embraced by artists in Brazil and Venezuela in the fifties, was suspended in the dialectics between the spatial and temporal registers operative in the displacement of line from its pictorial support to real space. Her drawings and prints from the sixties foreground line and the materials and ink, graphite, used-pen crayon, etc.-to deploy, through and disruption, or repetition through minimal interventions on the white page, nonsensical that systems and structures the more radical advanced attacks on the sculptural object of the late sixties and early seventies. Not one of Gego's drawings is like another, and their insubordinate force is twofold: they

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produce a literal disruption of form and gesture, and they reveal as obsolete any kind of stylistic categorization and/or line encoding. Indeed, browsing over a fraction of the two thousand works on paper, including etchings, lithographs, collages, handmade books, watercolors, and drawings that the artist made during her lifetime, one is amazed at the diversity of approaches toward form, material, and technique.

The one thing shared by these works on paper is the systematic use of the white surface of the support to create diagrams of dispersal that celebrate the margins, interstices, and in-betweenness of the lines, on the one hand undoing the self-sufficiency and semantic transparency of the line, and on the other underscoring the necessarily contextual nature of meaning. Despite the fact that the drawings all feature the line as protagonist, the line shifts dramatically within the work, or from one work to the next, producing modes that oscillate between, while undoing, the gestural and the mechanical.

Drawing provided Gego with strategies of diffusion and disruption akin to the liminal character of the medium. It was her prolific work on paper that delivered the liberatory effect that one perceives in the large environment presented to the public in 1969 and in the small works that preceded the Reticuldrea.In much of her graphic work, Gego was prone to exploring the boundless possibilities of line, combining structures, moods, and inflections that disrupted any preconceived order. Thus in 1968, aware of this insubordinate quality in Gego's work, Blanco wrote in regard to drawings exhibited that year: "In other cases, this kinship with sculpture takes place when lines break away from their parallel formation and twist in playful disarrayin and out of the stated plane." Later in the same article she added, The lines in Gego's drawing willjust as soon submit to a controlled parallel rhythm as to a playful fussy form. And just as she realizes and gives importance to the thickness of a line, Gego knows precisely what the white unmarked space can mean and how it can be brought into a totaling relationship with line.7 A series of untitled drawings made in 1969 with black, red, violet, and gray ink rehearsed the structural system deployed by the Reticuldrea.In this series of drawings, an irregular triangular net covers the white or cream sheet of paper until it overflows its borders. The density of the depicted modules and the thickness of the line varies, at times suggesting volume, at times emphasizing flatness. Continuity with real space was suggested by reference to a long-lasting visual tradition that sought to incorporate the frame by dismissing the margin as a limit, an operation that led to the displacement of line to space and to the ever expansive web of the Reticuldreaand then on to the deployment of a logic of connectivity and transformation, a process of becoming that would permeate all of Gego's work. It is likely that these drawings were produced in conjunction with, or maybe slightly before, the individual pieces that constituted the large Reticuldreaof 1969. It was Blanco, once 7.

Lourdes Blanco, "Gego's Drawings Appeal to Visual,"DailyJournal(Caracas), May 19, 1968.

107

Gego'sReticularea 1969-1982

Gego.Untitled. 1969.

Collectionof the GegoFoundation.

Photo:ReinaldoArmasPonce. again, who recorded this peculiar symbiosis among drawing, sculpture, and space taking place in Gego's work: Early this year [1969], however, her line took on paper an entirely different character: it became radial, it traced triangles, hexagons. The step into spaces was made with linear elements such as florist and stainto manageable lengths-with which she could less steel wire-clipped draw freely in space, delineating volume without confining it.8 nets that formed the Gego had been working on the three-dimensional Reticuldrea during the first half of 1969,9 but their environmental scale was probably influenced by director Miguel Arroyo's invitation to exhibit at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Caracas in June of that year. The work was placed in gallery number eight, a rectangular space that measures 8.34 by 4.35 by 4.50 meters. Photographs of the period, checklists, and several sketches that Gego produced for the installation indicate that the work was composed mostly of "columns," "screens," "appliques," meshes, and nets made of florist wire, steel, and aluminum based on triangular-hexagonal modules that hung from the ceiling and were distributed irregularly throughout the given space. These individual pieces (there were thirty-six according to one of Gego's checklists) varied in density, scale, and size. They were enumerated and described, 8.

Blanco, Gego:Reticuldrea,n.p.

A press review indicates that Gego had worked on the Reticulareafor three months prior to the 9.

June opening. See "'Reticularea': Redes Metalicas de Gego en un Ambiente del Museo," El Nacional (Caracas),June 6, 1969. On the other hand, a certificate, dated 1974, through which the Reticulireawas temporarily given to the Museo de Bellas Artes, dates the piece to 1968-69. This suggests that Gego might have started working on the individual pieces at the end of 1968 (typewritten document, Personal Archives, Gego Foundation, Caracas).

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though never titled; and Gego's handwritten notes indicated the orientation of the pieces in relation to the ceiling (i.e., horizontal, vertical), the wall on which they were to be located, and their placement on that wall, or if they were to go in the center of the room. From other checklists we learn that the "screens" were the larger, more bidimensional nets that Gego situated at irregular intervals along the perimeter of the room.10 The "columns" hung from the ceiling toward the floor. The "appliques" and "horizontals" designated the smaller pieces that were attached to the wall and those which hung parallel to the ceiling, like "clouds" or "beehives," to use Venezuelan poet Hanni Ossott's terminology.11 The checklists were structured loosely and their nomenclature, while simple, was not consistent. They attested to Gego's habit of organizing and recording all and aspects of her work, while also mirroring the unregulated, unforeseeable, in which she went distributed in the the arbitrary way space. Contingency pieces hand in hand with the unpredictable metamorphosis and fluid boundaries of the work, to which new pieces were added on account of sales, accidents, or the artist's habit of giving her work to friends. As a consequence, the identity of the work was constantly destabilized, not only by the different spaces in which it was shown and units by its lack of conventional supports, but also because the constitutive with some to diaor others made anew sold and changed, accidentally destroyed with the sketches and checklists, like logue corresponding space.12 Indeed, Gego's the Reticulirea itself, were constantly transformed: words and instructions were crossed out; new units, new shapes and new positions were added; numbers symbolizing nets were repeated in the sketches; and floor plans for the organization of the piece were rehearsed. Everything indicated the fluid structure of the work

10. Sketches and checklists produced for the exhibition in Gego's personal archives, Gego Foundation,Caracas.

11.

In 1977 Hanni Ossott wrote-with Gego's collaboration-the first thorough analysis of the artist's work. It was published in the catalog that accompanied Gego's important retrospective at the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas.See Hanni Ossott, Gego(Caracas:Museo de Arte Contempornneo, 1977).

In December of 1969 the Reticularea was also shown in New York at the Center for Interamerican 12.

Relations as part of an exhibition entitled Latin America:New Paintings and Sculpture:Juan Downey, Agustin Fernandez,Gego, GabrielMorera.In March 1975 the work participated in an exhibition entitled Relations and Contrastsin VenezuelanPainting at the Museo de Bellas Artes. Remaining in the same gallery, it was also in an exhibition that celebrated the official opening of the renovated Museo de Bellas Artes building on October 15, 1976. The exhibition was entitled The Plastic Arts in Venezuelaand it was organized as a salon, while also featuring works from the permanent collection. It was then that the Reticularea was awarded the first prize and acquired by the Museo de Bellas Artes. At the end of 1976, the Reticularea, along with the entire collection of Venezuelan art of the Museo de Bellas Artes, became part of the collection of the Galeria de Arte Nacional. There, the Reticuldreawas installed in gallery one at the beginning of 1977, and that year it was in another group show entitled Venezuelan Art. After three years of discussions, the permanent installation of the Reticuldreatook Contemporary place in 1980. In 1982, Dietrich Mahlow, a German curator and critic friend of Gego, invited the artist to participate in a group exhibition at the Alte Oper in Frankfurt entitled Spielraum-Raumspiele which opened on August 28. The work was shown along with Roaratorio,a sound (Playroom-Roomplay), piece byJohn Cage. In approximately four months, Gego created a new Reticulkrea. The production of this iteration of the work involved, more so than on previous occasions, an intense amount of labor, which relied on the participation of friends and colleagues.

Gego's Reticularea 1969-1982

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despite Gego's detailed planning. These documents oscillated between an orientational plan and the diagrammatic representation of a zone of indeterminacy that testified to Gego's frustrated attempt to bridge the gap between idea and representation, knowledge and understanding. In notes for her class, probably written in 1969, she stated in her still stilted Spanish: "There is one thing: to do something and to understand something [sic]. But one understands only when one knows and one knows when one has experienced, lived it."13 But as the Reticularea plunged into excess and disarray, order, as advocated by Gego's rigorous architectural training, proved unsustainable: terms, diagrams and sketches could not map, project, or rationalize the spatial and linear reversals operative in her work. The decentralized, antihierarchical, layered, and multiplicious logic of the Reticuldrea defied the structure of the logos in favor of affection and perception, advancing the rhizomatic associations that the work would later generate in its displacement of volume in favor of a surface of intensities. the Reticuldrea defied The various ensemble of pieces that constituted some of the most modulated screens enhanced the Even regularly description. their formlessness of the whole and by undoing of two-dimensionality, irregularity as some of them were bent to purposely deform the gridlike structure of the web.

Gego, untitled manuscript, Personal Archives, Gego Foundation, Caracas.

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Several of the horizontal pieces created three-dimensional clusters of metal that were defined as "clouds," "nests," or "beehives," but they did not correspond to any shape or form, either natural or machine made. Despite its basic geometric configuration, one that is predicated on a triangular grid with variable intersections, the Reticuldrea's most obvious operation was to dismantle the eidetic quality of geometry, the "ideal realm of construction."14 In Ossott's words, where in the work of Gego the most rigorous ordering of is presented, a mocking to the number, the measurement, duced. And if there, an eye thinks, another part of [this itself to erase all knowledge. Error means here willingness

the elements is also introeye] devotes to fail . . 15

An unconscious, formless, "other" geometry emerged, one in which defined form was substituted by flexible and unpredictable To this end, Gego connections. devised systems of linkage that facilitated an irregular modularity, which undermined the homogeneity we associate with grids. Discontinuity, disjunction, heterogeneity, and fragmentation were woven into the Reticuldrea to produce a space that disregarded the univocity and internal coherence of cubic architectural spaces and self-contained sculptural bodies. Most important, the performative dimension of the Reticuldrea, through which the work shifted from two-dimensional to three-dimensional, from object to environment, from field to collapsible net, from art to event, embodied a pliant logic rather than an organic one.

Indeed, assessments of Gego's work have used the term "organic constructivism" to describe her precarious geometries. In 1977 the Argentine critic Marta Traba defined the organic in relation to Gego's work: Gego thinks that adequate forms correspond to the functions that exist in nature. She thus establishes a homology between the real and dynamic existence of that vast organic ensemble, and the aspect that covers each one of its components.

Things live, namely, they function, with an end and a goal: such a necessary and just functioning determines form ... to Gego it is crucial to understand the structures of the organic form, the internal order that is verified in nature, the adequate relations of the parts to the whole.16 But despite Gego's continuous interest in and references to nature, the transitional and marginal, peripheral and supple, pliant and twisted behavior of the Reticuldrea defied the functional logic of organicism with its significant relationships among parts. Instead, the work's "rhizomatic" behavior was acknowledged by German architect Christian Thiel, who helped Gego install her last Reticuldrea at 14.

Ossott, Gego,p. 9.

15.

Ibid.

16.

Marta Traba, Gego(Caracas: Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, 1977), n.p. Emphasis in original.

On the organic and constructivist metaphors in modern sculpture, see Rosalind Krauss, Passages in ModernSculpture(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977), pp. 57-67, 138-46.

Gego s Reticularea 1969-1982

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the Alte Oper in Frankfurt in 1982. In a brief letter dated November 12, 1983, Thiel indicated to Gego how much her work seemed to operate according to this term appropriated and developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, which had been recently published (in 1980) and was popular among architects.17 There is no doubt that the association was motivated by the work's open and dysfunctional demeanor. As Deleuze and Guattari observed in "Rhizome," the introduction to their book, the tree is the image of the world in classical thought. The classical book responds to this notion of the root as the image of the tree-world: "This is the classical book, as noble, signifying, and subjective organic interiority (the strata of the book)."

They add: two: whenever we encounter this formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the most "dialectical" way possible, what we have before us is the most classical and well-reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought. Nature doesn't work that way: in nature roots are taproots with a more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather than a dichotomous one.18 One becomes

Against the binary logic of classicism, multiplicity engendered by rhizomes operates with a frank disregard for centralized systems that rely on a strong principal unity. Against idealized structures (social, visual, conceptual, linguistic, etc.), rhizomatic performance undoes Platonism and instead favors heterogeneity, antihierarchical and an affective materialism that is mutable and connections, It its nature as it increases its connections: in it, there are no transitory. changes lines.19 Reticular positions, only configurations are also antagonistic to centralized structures.20 Not only do they not have a center, top, or bottom, but they also mark and disrupt the homogeneous quality of a space organized according to Cartesian coordinates. Their capacity to occupy interstitial spaces was exploited by the Reticuldrea, whose reticules can be expanded infinitely while welcoming disruptions and broken lineages generative of multiple differences that dismiss ideas of unity, sameness, and identity. Instead of treating her reticules as objects, the artist that an in-betweenness wove together the margins of the room, celebrating attested to the connective impulse of the work. The implications of this scattered configuration are clear: it undermines the authority of the autonomous sculptural object and of the monument; it is attentive to circumstances and context (the sociocultural milieu in which the work is produced) in its transformation of abstract space 17.

Christian Thiel, letter to Gego, November 12, 1983, Personal Archives, Gego Foundation, Caracas.

18.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 5.

19.

Ibid., p. 8.

20.

According to Yves Christen, as quoted by Deleuze and Guattari, a nonevolutionist scheme might have to substitute "reticular schemas ... for the bush or tree schemas used to represent evolution" (ibid., p. 10).

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into specific place; and it problematizes recognition and representation in being dismissive of identity (of fixed artistic categories such as sculpture, architecture, and drawing) and the ontological certainty that accompanies our classical understanding of space, mind/body, and objects. Accordingly, one of the work's most palpable operations is a diffracting effect that undoes the fixed boundaries between perceptions and positions, not to mention drawing and sculpture, volume and space, virtuality and reality, in favor of a nontotalized process of aesthetic production that acts as a figuration of the historical, material, and affective situation the work occupies.

Indeed, in Gego's substitution of a pliant geometry for the geometric abstract object, the work does away with conventional hierarchies that rule spatial apprehension: inside and outside, up and down, left and right: in short, point of view. Thus, the Reticuldreamanages to deliver a subtle critique of classical rationalism and the fixed structures upon which it is predicated by decentering the viewer's positionality and frustrating the artificial separation of the spatiotemporal registers upon which objective analysisdepends.

As German social theorist Niklas Luhmann has observed, European rationalas ity, a unified semantic, is characterized by its use of distinctions. At stake is a "narratorwho stages the narration-whether of the novel or of world history-in which he no longer appears,"21 an observer who draws distinctions and who remains unobserved; who distinguishes what he observes from everything else that remains as "unmarked space"; who observes from this "unmarked space": "The person, whom one could ask: why this and not another way."22This presupposes a society of consent "arbitrated"from positions of authority within the system. To challenge these "uncontested standpoints," Luhmann proposes to operate on the basis of only one distinction: that between system and environment, self-reference and external reference, and the imaginary space of possible combinations this distinction produces. Such a strategy, claims Luhmann, calls for consistently "autological" concepts, since the observer must also recognize himself as a system-in-the-environment as long as he carries out observations and connects them recursively. The narrator appears himself in what he narrates. He is observable as an observer.

He constitutes himself in his own field-and thereby necessarily in the mode of contingency, that is, with an awareness of other possibilities.23 The reentry of the observer, the "self,"in the system, shatters the false unity of a world in harmony. Instead, it reveals the observer as observable, and underlines the condition that "observation in the world makes the world visible-and invisible."24Therein, argues Luhmann, lies the foundational contingency of modernity, Niklas Luhmann, "European Rationality," in RethinkingImagination: Cultureand Creativity,ed.

21.

Gillian Robinson andJohn Rundell (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 67.

Ibid.

22.

23.

Ibid., p. 73.

Ibid.

24.

1969-1982

Gego'sReticularea

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predicated on a set of linked alternatives in which value has been substituted for positions and functions vulnerable to further observation. Without a center of consensus, a vulnerable space of intensities, of competing descriptions and partial observations, is the only ground for the legitimacy of modernity.25 That Gego's work would embody a spatial field of multiple connections between its constitutive units-materially discontinuous, and structurally and visuher suit inconsistent-would position as a Jewish woman emigre in the ally her most radical work at the age of 54-challenging who produced periphery cultural about hegemonic production, male artistic supremacy, and expectations the myth of a youthful avant-garde, and substituting instead a politics of location and contingency. I would like to suggest thus, that Gego's Reticuldrea articulates a model of spectatorship in which, following Luhmann, the observer reenters observation, "constitutes [herself] in [her] own field-and thereby necessarily in the mode of contingency, that is, with an awareness of other possibilities."26 How important the observer was for the meaning of the work is evident in the photographic record of the different installations of the Reticuldrea. Most of the photographs feature visitors and their interaction with the work. The images Niklas Luhmann, Observacionesde la modernidad.Racionalidady contingenciaen la sociedadmoderna 25.

(Barcelona: Paidos, 1997). On Luhmann's understanding of modernity and its affinities with the semantics of postmodernism, see William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann's Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), pp. 1-28.

26.

Luhmann, "European Rationality,"p. 73. \

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point to the Reticuldrea's capacity to address not one but many spectators. Peter H6nig, who was in charge of photographing the work in Germany on the occasion of its 1982 installation, wrote to Gego that he could not conceive of the work within out people; that he had the impression that it could not be considered observer and between without into account the close isolation, taking relationship work.27 But the position of these observers is also important to understand the spectatorial model at stake. Unable to distance themselves from the work, viewers cannot occupy an "unmarked space," a riveting point of view from where to describe the work/world. Local reviewers also emphasized the enveloping quality of the environment, which could not be apprehended as a definite whole but instead had to be experienced. The operation was one of fusion with the work rather than analytical observation of the work. Guevara, one of Reticuldrea's most careful observers, wrote that here "the drawing of lines has jumped to real space, the environment, to surround the spectator in a new and effective experience." In lieu of one space, the viewer was in the presence of a thousand fused spaces in "discontinuous equilibrium," wrote Guevara. "It is as if we walked inside one of Gego's drawings [which] suddenly materialized making real space its own."28 Against the unified quality of object-bound works of art, Guevara emphasized that within the Reticuldrea, each corner, each change of visual objective, each mental precision of [what has been] observed, means a new vision, a different aspect, unique in its own. From one spectator to the other, from one attitude to the other, the work also transforms itself, varies, fluctuates, develops.29 This temporal sequencing that characterizes the Reticuldrea must be sustained by the viewer, he clarified, "because we become part of it, because once inside, outside feeling is inconceivable."30 Guevara attributed the "discontinuous equilibrium" of the Reticuldrea to the interruptions in material, scale, form, and structure posed by the work, which generated a multiplicity of spaces that could not be submitted to any kind of overarching scheme. Inside the Reticuldrea the effect was one of alloverness, undetermined boundaries, and uncharted fields in which line demarcates but never delimits space.

Indeed, the dispersed body of the Reticuldrea is woven into space itself-is and of it, not as an idealized, homogeneous part parcel of our apprehension as a but inflected field. The viewer, too, is woven into the entity, circumstantially Reticuldrea and the surrounding space; she sees herself as observer, reenters observation, and destabilizes the authority of an omnipresent observer. And what is observed is always different, always partial, always a fragment, never whole. At

27.

28.

29.

30.

Peter H6nig, letter to Gego, December 17, 1982, Personal Archives, Gego Foundation, Caracas.

Roberto Guevara, "'Reticularea' de Gego," El Nacional (Caracas),June 10, 1969.

Ibid.

Ibid.

Gego'sReticulkrea 1969-1982

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times it might appear structural, and at times linear, at times clear and at times messy, at times geometrical but generally formless. In Ossott's words: And if, slightly tired, the viewer abandons the discovery of the constructive character of the forms, letting the work to rest and abandoning the perception of the modes in which it was configured, so that there something other is shown ... then, in that moment of rest, emerges an alwaysinconclusive configuration, always in the making, a work open to error. ..31

Aware of what escapes all observation, Luhmann writes: "One cannot see what one cannot see, but perhaps one can at least see that one cannot see what one cannot see."32Incapable of embodying wholeness, the Reticuldrea'simplicit boundlessness and defiance of structure prescribes this incapacity. The viewer finds him or herself inescapably occupying, while constantly unfolding, the blind spot of observation.

Five years later Gego would have the opportunity to increase the rhizomatic potential of the Reticuldreaby furthering sculptural disintegration and arriving at a sort of nothingness that would frustrate the identity and illusory culmination of the 1969 environment. In 1974 the Reticulireawas installed in gallery one of the new building of the Museo de Bellas Artes. There the piece acquired a more sculptural quality, since it could be read as a volume, a semitransparent and indescribable volume, which hung from a metal grid and measured approximately 3.5 by 5.4 by 5 meters.33 Ceiling pieces and "appliques" seem to have been obliterated, and the large screens were hung one next to the other, further undoing any kind of structural transparency. In photographs, the resulting configuration resembles a big knot, a cluster of entangled metal, formless, shapeless, and with imprecise boundaries. Grouped tightly, some of the columns and screens touched the floor while other pieces were suspended between ceiling and floor. In photographic details of the work, the triangular structure is barely discernible, so that the geometric reference seems to have been displaced by a maze of lines. This effect was produced by the proximity of the nets and meshes, whose arrangement here followed the principle of accumulation and agglomeration rehearsed loosely in the 1969 installations. As a consequence of this absolute disregard for structure, clarity gave way to opacity and the consequent dismissal of linearity, precision, contour, boundary, and form, in favor of fusion, flux, and flow. Although less dispersed and more "sculptural"than the environmental installations of 1969, the elusive "volume" of 1974, which returned the viewer's gaze and could be walked around, allowed no 31.

32.

33.

Ossott, Gego,p. 6.

Luhmann, "European Rationality,"p. 77.

Sketch (dated 1975), Personal Archives, Gego Foundation, Caracas.

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OCTOBER

process of identification between viewer and work. Unable to grasp the underlying logic of this amorphous object, the spectator had to be satisfied with only surfaces and comply with the structural opacity of this "big nothing."34 At the end of 1976, the Reticuldrea, along with the entire collection of Venezuelan art in the Museo de Bellas Artes, became part of the collection of the Galeria de Arte Nacional, where it was installed at the beginning of 1977. Once again, the work mutated into a disfigured body that could not be penetrated or walked through as it had appeared in the 1969 installation. The large scale of the rooms and the work's relation with other works on display emphasized the fuzzy and indeterminate outlines that this version of the Reticuldrea generated. In both installations of the seventies, the scriptural quality that Guevara had recognized in the work as early as 1970, when he defined the Reticuldrea's behavior as "zigzagging writing," was exploited to its fullest, in favor not of scriptural meaning but of the release that one associates with doodles, graffiti, and "automatic writing."35 A written body in which legibility was dramatically obliterated, this version of the Reticuldrea was a direct attack on organic notions of the sculptural body as whole, unified and standard, in favor of a deformable mass irreducible to delineation.

That these clustered, more bodily than spatial configurations of the seventies became a relevant model to Gego is evident from two 1977 sketches for a future permanent installation of the Reticuldrea. As soon as the work became part of the collection of the Galerfa de Arte Nacional, plans were made to house the work permanently in one of the galleries. Sketches for this installation show plans From Eva Hesse's diaries in her description of Right After (1969), as cited in Lucy R. Lippard, 34.

Eva Hesse (New York:Da Capo Press, 1992), p. 161.

35.

Roberto Guevara, "Revision,"Papel Literatio, El Nacional, (Caracas),June 21, 1970.

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Photo:Paolo Gasparini. to install the work in a tent. But this time Gego placed the majority of nets in a central area while a smaller group of hanging pieces was to be located to the right of the entrance to the room. The central grouping was to be approximately 4.5 x 4 meters and the circulation of the visitor predicated on a rotary motion bordering the conglomerate of nets. It is obvious that Gego was thinking of recent installations, such as the ones described above, as a viable, if crucially different model of undoing spectatorial stasis and sculptural equilibrium.

If the 1969 installations of the Reticuldrea were able to postpone the tranand universal character of geometry and Cartesian space, these scendentalism later installations resisted the idea of a sculptural body and the related notions of defined shape, proportion, and interiority. The work's distorted and amorphous effects were partly the result of unpredictable connections between drawing and sculpture, space and line, geometry and cluster, inside and outside. And in this hybrid approach the work advanced the concept of bicho (bug), which was the term increasingly used by Gego to refer to all her three-dimensional work, probably in an effort to avoid a conventional terminology associated with sculpture and This word, which can be found on the cover of the three notebooks the fine iarts. that record all of Gego's three-dimensional work from 1957 to 1989, first appears in reference to a small work entitled Invisible Dog or Bug from 1965. The small piece, accidentally destroyed, was Gego's most iconic work, although sketchy and freely made with strands of thin metal that were easy to manipulate. In Spanish bicho means animal or bug. In Venezuela, bicho is also used as a colloquial interjection of rejection, a pejorative designation, and a related word such as bichero is used to refer to groupings of heterogeneous animals or objects.

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The word bicho, like the term "messy," recurs throughout Gego's lists and descriptions of her work, and is evidence of the artist's disdain for tectonic legibility, structural precision, and medium specificity. Curiously enough, in Spanish, bicho also refers, according to the Real Academy Spanish Dictionary, to a person whose form or appearance is absurd, and/or a person with bad intentions. While it is likely that Gego, in using bicho to describe her three-dimensional work, was appropriating the humble and anti-idealistic connotations of the word, it is interesting to note that installations of the Reticuldrea in the seventies did resemble a huge, disfigured, deformed sculptural body-a sculptural bicho, one might say. This flow between space and body that the Reticuldrea incarnated has been theoretically articulated by architect Greg Lynn in his counterproposal for "The proportional a between "36 Against the notion and a man... correspondence temple well-shaped of body and architecture as a closed system of proportional orders and functional relations between constituent parts, Lynn proposes bodily deformations through the deployment of local alliances and connections of base matter. "This model of 'continuous transformation' proposes that 'bodies emerge through processes of differentiation, yielding varying degrees of unity based on specific affiliations and mutations."'37 And borrowing from feminist French writer Luce Irigaray, Lynn proposes an alternative bodily scheme, one ruled by the condition of viscosity. Thus, he writes, "Viscosity is a quality of being mutable or changeable in response to both favorable and unfavorable situations that occur by vicissitude."38 Or, again, referring to Irigaray's exploration of the fluid quality of the feminine: "the viscous [is] the model for relations of the 'near and not the proper."'39 In its improper use of geometry, its attack on gestalt and organic integrity, its deployment of a deformative matrix and dismissal of proportions, symmetry, and delineation, the Reticuldrea of the seventies advanced the idea of bicho, of residue and disfiguration used by Gego to counteract the authority of the sculptural signifier. In its dismissal of the notion of self-identity and its mutational capacity, the more bodily Reticuldrea of the seventies rejected the correspondence between the ideality of geometries and the ideality of bodies, of "man as measure of all things," of "man" as the standard ideal. Hence these seventies installations, in their dialogue with central geometric abstract works of the period (produced

by Gego's male colleagues), rebelliously embraced a certain monstrosity.

For Brian Massumi, "monstrosity,"40 following the rhizomatic logic of Deleuze and Guattari, is associated with processes of becoming and mutation. "Becomingother" responds to a desire to escape fixation, sameness, bodily limitation, and idealized abstraction in the face of constraints that the body-in-becoming transforms 36.

1998), 37.

38.

39.

40.

1992).

Greg Lynn, "Body Matters," in Folds, Bodies & Blobs: CollectedEssays (Brussels: La lettre volee, p. 135. Emphasis in original.

Ibid., p. 137.

Ibid., p. 145.

Ibid., p. 146. Emphasis in original.

Brian Massumi, A User'sGuide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,

Gego'sReticularea 1969-1982

119

into opportunities. The body-in-becoming undoes habitual patterns of action, and preestablished organization and boundaries, and it is always singular in its mutational capacity to challenge the standard. Accordingly, feminist writer Rosi Braidotti, in her exploration of the sequence "Mothers, Monsters and Machines,"41 refers to the idea of monstrosity as a deviation from the norm. A closer reading of the term in relation to the feminine body leads her to unearth disturbing but by now expected historical associations. In literature, Western philosophy, scientific discourse, and psychoanalysis, "woman" is the negative term of the binary logic that rules Western thought. Furthermore, Braidotti writes, The woman's body can change shape in pregnancy and childbearing; it is therefore capable of defeating the notion of fixed bodilyform, of visible, recognizable, clear, and distinct shapes as that which marks the contour of the body. She is morphologically dubious.... is monWoman/mother strous by excess; she transcends established norms and transgresses boundaries. She is monstrous by lack: woman/mother does not possess the substantive unity of the masculine subject. Most important, through her identification with the feminine she is monstrous by displacement: as sign of the in-between areas, of the indefinite, the ambiguous.42 and ambiguity are of course tropes that In-betweenness, indefiniteness/infinitude, I've been using to describe the spatial behavior of the 1969 Reticuldrea. And if I am compelled to displace these tropes onto a bodily reading of the 1970s installations of the work, it is because they seem to be aware of the (sculptural) body as something that has to come under attack. Opaque and impenetrable, clustered and unruly, the Reticuldrea was the "other" to the perfect virtual cubes of Kinetic art, which, by the seventies, had become the "standard" in the Venezuelan urban landscape.43 A text by philosopher Elizabeth Grosz links feminist concerns about monstrosity with an architecture of excess.44 She proposes, through a confrontation of structures of waste (Alphonso Lingis's community of outcasts and the marginalized, Georges Bataille's notion of "unproductive expenditure," and Irigaray's 41.

Rosi Braidotti, "Mothers, Monsters and Machines," in Nomadic Subjects:Embodimentand Sexual FeministTheory(New York:Columbia University Press, 1994). Braidotti's intenDifferencein Contemporary tion here is to delineate "a new figuration of feminist subjectivity" that takes into consideration recent developments in the field of biotechnology, "particularlyartificial procreation" (p. 78).

42.

Braidotti, pp. 82-83. On the relevance of the Deleuzian text and the logics of the rhizome for feminism, see also Rosi Braidotti, "Toward a New Nomadism: Feminist Deleuzian Tracks; or, Metaphysics and Metabolism," and Elizabeth Grosz, "A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics," in GillesDeleuzeand the Theaterof Philosophy,ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (NewYork: Routledge, 1994).

43.

Luis Enrique Perez Oramas has written thoroughly and intelligently about the relationship between Gego's work and Venezuelan Kinetic art. See his "Gego and the Analytic Context of Cinetismo," in InvertedUtopias:Avant-GardeArt in Latin America,ed. Mari Carmen Ramirez and Hector Olea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), and "Gego: Laocoonte, las Redes y la Indecisi6n de las Cosas,"in Gego:ObraCompleta,1955-1990, ed. Iris Peruga (Caracas: Fundacion Cisneros, 2003).

44.

Elizabeth Grosz, "Architecture of Excess," in Anymore,ed. Cynthia C. Davidson (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 260-66.

120

OCTOBER

and bureauto destabilize the authoritarian, monumental, maternal-feminine) cratic structure of architecture by positing a feminine economy of surplus as a radical alternative to patriarchal notions of space and time. The Irigarayian interval is here the operative term: "Undecidably spatial and temporal," the interval embodies a passage, an in-betweenness that displaces the conventional opposition between externalized feminine spatiality and interiorized masculine duration-a philosophical aporia that posits the maternal feminine as the ground, the place, and the space that underlies male identity and its structured systems of spatial and material organization. Excess left by the weaving of space and time, "site of their difference and their interchange," the interval might be made central to an architecture in which the "more" is not cast off but made central, in which expenditure is sought out, in which instability, fluidity, the return of space to the bodies whose morphologies it upholds and conforms, in which the monstrous and the extra-functional, where consumption as much as production, act as powerful forces.45 The utter dysfunctionality, anti-organicism, and linear excess deployed by the deformed body of the Reticuldrea is the result of its anti-architectural stance and lawless incontinence. The latter refers to the work's paradoxical combination of dispersed and sheltering effects, infinite and erratic, defiant of the conquering gaze of the observer. And this logic makes one ask if this pulsation of the work between entrapment and infinite release, between accumulation and dispersal, was an effort to think a "monstrous architecture." Or was it an effort to think the monstrous architecture of Caracas, the same one that architectural historian Juan Pedro Posani described in the sixties, with allusions to organic dysfunction and to eclecticism as a system?46 Or perhaps the work tried to embody that "other" "monstrous architecture," the one that disturbed the urban "normalcy" of the city

45.

Ibid., p. 264.

46.

In 1969, the year that the Reticulareawas installed for the first time, Caracasa travesde su arquitectura (Caracas through Its Architecture) was published. There, Posani assessed the current urban situation of the city in the following terms: "Everything proceeds without cohesion. The incongruous repetition of studies, of research, is part of all the offices and organisms concerned, independently of course, with Caracas. Confusion, uncontrol, inappropriateness dominate. Decisions are not taken, and when they are taken, either they are taken late or do not become reality for lack of adequate organic, financial, juridical, and political means." Posani underlined as pervasive the lack of permanence and the absence of spatial and temporal rigor in urban planning. "The city,"he wrote, "renovates itself continuously by superposed or contiguous pieces, with a permanent insurgency of new uses next to the residues of others more diverse and old. Next to empty lots, the product of collapsed houses that were never substituted, rise lot-line walls belonging to tall office buildings and one-level commercial buildings. This produces a total absence of visual coherence, which does not achieve the quality of a congruent superposition either. But, aside from that, for twenty years, the people of the city have gotten used to live among works in demolition, being remodeled or in construction, to circulate through streets in permanent crisis of being open and closed between dust and noise" (Graziano Gasparini and Juan Pedro Posani, Caracasa travesde su arquitectura[Caracas:Armitano Editores, 1998], pp. 514, 516-17).

Gego'sReticularea 1969-1982

121

and is consistently thematized as the residue of modernity, the marginal site par excellence,literally, the land of the outcast: the shantytown.

Indeed, if there is a "monstrous architecture,"an architecture of the "near and not the proper,"a sheltering architecture that grows at the margins of the city, not only on the hills that surround it, or on abandoned lots, but also in between middleclass, even rich neighborhoods, in between commercial and residential areas, in public plazas and underneath bridges and highways, it is the shanty. Totally unrepresentable, obliterated from official visual discourse (shantytowns are not marked on maps), they are defined as informal, irregular, uncontrolled, subnormal, spontaneous, and illegal. Eliminating this unavoidable residual urban architecture has been the backbone of all Venezuelan political programs. Oblivious to efforts to think the shantytown as a peculiar urban formation that requires specific ways of integration into the life of the metropolis, past governments and economic elites helped to redefine it as the quintessential negative space.

One should not be surprised, then, that some of Grosz's suggestions for a monstrous, alternative architecture coincide with the unorthodox, fluid, and rhizomatic nature of the shanty (which grows and divides itself by adapting to the needs of its inhabitants, has multiple entrances, is alterable, establishes circumstantial connections between heterogeneous spaces, never obeys a master plan, multiplies and decomposes at the same time, collapses public and private spaces, labor and leisure, family and community, micropolitics and life). Accordingly, Grosz argues for an architecture shaped by the events, objects, and people who inhabit it, a heterogeneous space capable of housing multiplicity, an architecture of passage, of domestic and civil mobility. She returns to an association between the maternal body and the sheltering function of architecture to posit as central to the radical project of a "monstrous architecture," "an economy of pure gift... of immense expenditure ... of excessive generosity."47 Could not one ask if, in its embodiment of a "crisis" (of geometric abstraction, of linearity, of urban space), in its aggregational logic, in its antisculptural stance, the Reticuldreapronounced itself as residue and margin, as nonfunctional space outside architecture, as pure excess ... as gift? Is it possible to read in the tensions between fragmented space and irregular body in Gego's Reticuldreathe perpetual becoming of the shanty, with its emphasis on sheltering the body as opposed to building permanent architectures?

I want to argue in light of the present study that Gego's work represents, in the isolation of its sculptural parameters, the singularity of its morphological structure, and in its peculiar historical position, a response to the spectacularity of Venezuelan Kinetic art and its formulaic and monumental organization. The Reticulirea'srecurrent deformation of the grid and topological reversals embraced the (ideal) world of geometries, systems, and organization only to undermine it from within. In its dialogue with the legacy of constructivism, the functionalist language of architecture and engineering, the building of a country characterized 47.

Grosz, "AnArchitecture of Excess," p. 265.

122

OCTOBER

by extremes of wealth and underdevelopment, the work was both a symptom and a model for the discontinuous social and cultural fabric of the country. Is the work's emphasis on layering, accumulation, eidetic opacity, dispersal, and formlessness then a response to the supple and precarious urban situation that characterized the South American postwar metropolis?

There is no larger record, aside from some scattered notes, of Gego's discursive engagement with the cultural and social issues of her time. But the times were discursive, and the fifties' rhetoric of progress and development, the ground from which a new modern and technologically advanced society, based on the riches of the soil, would be constructed, was replaced in the sixties by clashes between a wealthy state and its erratic urban and social politics. One should assume that the complexity of contemporary historical situations permeated Gego's work and that an intricate network of nuanced mediations infused its semiotic constitution.

I am arguing that it was through Gego's relationship to line and space (urban, architectural, and sculptural) that the Reticulirea was able to generate a series of questions that problematized the smooth grids embraced, on the one hand, by an inconsistent project of construction and urbanism oblivious to local conditions and, on the other, by the calculated morphologies of Kinetic art.

Indeed, while espousing an architectural language, employing architectural tools, and developing architectural paradigms of production and reception (spatial contextuality, attack on the contemplative mode of spectatorship, environmental scale), Gego's work celebrated linear, geometric, and spatial inconsistency, and undermined the principles of organization, containment, and structure that rule over architecture. In a short manuscript entitled "Gego: Drawings for Projects," written by Ossott in 1976 for a small exhibition at the Instituto de Diseno Fundaci6n Neumann, the author observed in regard to Gego's architectural education that the students of the thirties had to adjust to the point of view imposed by the professor and that experimentation was only possible outside the classroom. Ossott added, "Gego, like us, despised the demands and the premises dictated by the architecture professors."48 Indeed, there is a line of thinking that draws attention to the authoritarian dimension of architecture: its reliance on geometry, on boundaries, and on notions of wholeness, unity, and harmony.49 In Venezuela, during the period of urban planning and modernization in the fifties, and into the social and urban decline that followed in the sixties, architecture stood for self-containment, progress, and order. It was to be the means by which the amorphousness of the city, its semirural and precarious shape, and its increasingly marginal population and uncontrolled riches were to be regulated and systematized. But by the end of 48.

Hanni Ossott, "Gego: Dibujos para proyectos," typewritten document, Personal Archives, Gego Foundation, Caracas.

49.

See, for example, Denis Hollier, Against Architecture:The Writingsof GeorgesBataille (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1989); Greg Lynn, Folds, Bodies & Blobs: CollectedEssays; and Elizabeth Grosz, the Outside:Essayson Virtualand Real Space(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2001).

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OCTOBER

the sixties, despite official efforts to eradicate the shanty, that ubiquitous icon of underdevelopment and of the Venezuelan urban landscape, its presence was stronger than ever. The shanty's anti-architectural stance, its formlessness, its precariousness, its ever-expansive structure, was everywhere present; the modern dream of a self-contained urban grid nurtured by the wealth of the national oil industry was only political rhetoric. To Gego the shanty seems to have been not so much an outsider and peripheral construction but the backbone of social survival. Like the hut built by the Indian, the shanty was a refuge, the necessary shelter for survival. So in her introductory lecture, Gego asked her architecture students to imagine themselves constructing a shelter in what was to become one of the populated shantytowns around the urban area, the hills along the Catia-Maiquetiahighway: I suppose that each of you knows the Catia-Maiquetia highway and that you know that in that region there are hills, vacant lots, dry streams or [streams] with water. Imagine that you have to erect there a refuge without your having access to civilization! Which are the materials that you find there that could help your purpose? How are you going to combine these materials? What are their dimensions and which are the dimensions of the refuge?50 It is worth noting that in the original Spanish text the words in Gego's description are immediately recognizable to any Venezuelan as characteristic of the shantytown landscape. For example, she used cerrosfor hills, not colinas, which has a more pastoral connotation. (Cerrosis actually the generic term used in Venezuela to refer to the shantytowns.) To the urban dweller the cerrosare stripped of their geological meaning and are instead identified with the shantytown. Baldios are vacant or abandoned landscapes or lots and are the perfect site for temporary constructions that grow randomly according to the immediate necessities of their inhabitants. And quebrada,meaning "streams,"is the final crucial word, not only because streams may provide water when running water is lacking, but also because as the floodings of December 1999, the worst natural disaster in recent Venezuelan history, demonstrated that the streams can rise dramatically with the rain and then overflow, producing ground displacements and fatal mudslides that put the cerrospopulation at permanent risk.

Gego's exercise, which was to generate intuitive responses from her students-she asked them to write everything that crossed their minds in relation to these questions and not to use their unfamiliarity with the matter as an excusedisplayed her emphasis on local conditions and contextual contiguity. Even in her introductory class she pressed her students to think of a particular situation, the local demands of the place, rather than an ideal construction site. Gego dismissed imported cultural models and cautioned her students to learn from them as long 50.

Gego, "Programacion de unas charlas durante el ler semestre Febrero-Mayo 1965," typewritten document, Personal Archives, Gego Foundation, Caracas.

Gego'sReticularea

1969-1982

125

as local necessities were not overlooked. "Because in many cases," she wrote, "the result is the unsatisfactory copy."51 In Gego's artistic work, and from her notations on architecture, one can perceive a growing skepticism toward ideal urban, geometric, and sculptural organizations. It is in this context that the Reticuldrea can be understood as a conflictive linear geometric body, whose behavior was a dialogical response to Gego's architectural background and the local material conditions in which her work was produced. One of the outstanding gestures of the Reticuldrea was its capacity to mutate, to fluctuate, to change in relation to the spaces and circumstances in which the work operated, while upsetting the notion of architectural space as a container, and of line as the boundary of bodies. As opposed to the logic of the monument, which occupies and memorializes a unique space, the Reticulkreaembraced a logic of displacement limited, however, by the built-in precariousness of the pieces, and by Gego's age-the incapacity of her body to fluctuate along with her work.52 the resources that would have allowed a continuous mutation of the Unfortunately, work, even after her death, were not available to the artist, and today the Reticuldreais poorly installed (after undergoing a restoration in the mid-nineties) in a permanent space in the Galeria de Arte Nacional in Caracas. But for more than a decade after its inaugural exhibition, the Reticuldrea was on the move, and many of its premises migrated into other important projects made by Gego in the years that followed.

51.

Gego, "Programaci6n,"n.p.

52.

In 1972, the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York, planned to show Gego's Reticuldrea.

Gego, who had originally accepted the invitation, had to withdraw the project due to an accident that forced her to rest. In a letter, she wrote to James Harithas, then director of the museum, "I am sure you realize that to revive the sleeping beauty Reticuldreaafter three years will take a great deal of personal handicraft, but in my actual condition I am unable to handle this task.... A curious feature of my work is, as you know, the personal handling, staging, and displaying of the Reticuldreain a different architectural environment. I can only hope to develop a system by which it can be possible to arrange exhibitions without so much of my personal intervention" (Gego, letter to James Harithas, July 21, 1972, Personal Archives, Gego Foundation, Caracas). In 1974, she was invited again to exhibit at the Everson Museum and the Lowe Art Gallery of Syracuse University, then directed by Stanton L. Catlin. Her response was negative; the nomadic potential of the piece was contradicted by its ephemeral quality, its delicate constitution. She wrote: "Yourgalleries at the Everson Museum of Art provoke to make a huge and environmental work-which again after two or three installations will be condemned to death, a fact I can't afford" (Gego, letter to Sandra Trop Blumberg, Acting Director of the Everson Museum of Art, July 18, 1974, Personal Archives, Gego Foundation, Caracas). Despite Gego's struggles with the issues outlined above, the Reticularea was reinstalled and reproduced a total of six times, always in a different form and with the help of assistants, friends, and colleagues.

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OCTOBER 114

ISBN0-262-75263-8

Jean Arnaud

Touching to See

George Baker

Photography's Expanded Field

Eric Bullot

Keaton and Snow

T.J. Demos

The Art of Darkness: On Steve McQueen

Mark Godfrey

Photography Found and Lost: On Tacita Dean's Floh

Annette Michelson

The Sound of Music: A Conversation with Michael Snow

Malcolm Turvey

The Child in the Machine: On the Use of CGI in Michael Snow's *Corpus Callosum