Real bodies: Video in the 1990s

Art History

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 185-213

  Lajer Burcharth, Ewa ^a  

^a HARVARD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34347308769     PISSN: 01416790     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8365.00055     Document Type: Review

References (28)

1. See Lynne Cooke, 'Gary Hill: Beyond Babel', in Gary Hill, exh. cat., Valencia, 1993, esp. pp. 163-8
2. Quoted in Lucinda Furlong, 'A Manner of Speaking: Interview with Gary Hill', Afterimage, vol. 10, no. 8, March 1983, pp. 13-14
3. Rosalind Krauss, 'Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism', October, no. 1, 1976, pp. 51-64
4. The terms 'projection' and 'introjection' have rich connotations in psychoanalytic theory. I am using them here in relation to Lacan's theory of the gaze which, I want to suggest, may be seen to have informed Hill's video installation and on which I will have more to say below. What I want to signal now is the psychic dimension at which the screen (in the Lacanian sense of the word, i.e., the system of cultural representation) operates in relation to the subject. As Lacan's notorious and much commented upon diagram of the two intersecting perspectival cones illustrating the relation between the subject and the gaze (the self and the Other) suggests, the screen should be understood as both external to the subject, cutting through its field of vision, and internal, articulating the subject on the unconscious level, from within. (Cf. Jacques Lacan, 'Of the Gaze as Objet Petit a', The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan, New York, 1981, p. 106.) It is in this sense, I am proposing, that Hill's work visualizes the screen as a subjective site of both projection (from the outside) and introjection (from the inside, via internal assimilation). His topography of overlapping bodily and textual fragments may thus be seen as an image of a subject that the screen renders both intelligible and (dis) articulated from within. The fragments of flesh may be seen as reminders that the subject's inscription in the symbolic realm happens at a cost - of the 'pound of flesh', as Lacan put it, finding in Shakespeare a metaphor for the symbolic castration. Yet, these remains may also be seen as tokens of incompleteness, or failure of cultural inscription, that is, as the remnants of the self unassimilated by language and returning to haunt it
5. The Real was addressed by Lacan at different stages of the development of his thought, most extensively in 'Of the Gaze as objet Petit a'; and in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book VII, London, 1992
6. Illuminating discussions of the concept were offered by Slavoj Žižek, 'Which Subject of the Real', The Sublime Subject of Ideology, London and New York, 1989, pp. 153-99
7. Joan Copjec, 'Cutting up', [1989], repr. in her Read My Desire, Cambridge, MA, 1994, pp. 39-63
8. In relation to contemporary art, see Parveen Adams's interesting essay, 'The Violence of Paint', in Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Journal of Philosophy and the Visual Arts. The Body, 1993, pp. 53-8
9. For sustained, critical - albeit differently so - exegeses of the gaze as an imaginary apparatus that structures the subject in relation to culture, see Normal Bryson, 'The Gaze in the Expanded Field', in Hal Foster (ed.), Vision and Visuality, Seattle, 1988, pp. 87-108
10. Kaja Silverman, 'Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look and Image', Male Subjectivity at the Margins, New York, 1992, pp. 125-56 (on the role of the screen in this process)
11. For a most pithy discussion of essentialism and constructionism, see Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature & Difference, New York, 1989
12. For a critique and/or discussion of the shortcomings of the constructionist approach, see, for example, Susan Bordo 'Feminism, Postmodernism and Gender-Scepticism', in Linda J. Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism, New York, 1990
13. and, more recently, Caroline Buynum, 'Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist Perspective', Critical Inquiry, vol. 22, no. 1, Autumn 1995
14. As one observer put it recently, '[m]ost of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of the observer in a "real", optically perceived world'. See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, Mass., 1990, p. 2
15. For the masochistic trope in contemporary male art, see also Amelia Jones's provocative essay 'Dis/playing the phallus: male artists perform their masculinities', Art History, vol. 17, no. 4, December 1994, pp. 546-84
16. Silverman has discussed and developed theoretically the idea of male projection as the central mechanism of male psyche in 'Lost Objects and Mistaken Subjects', in The Acoustic Mirror: the Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington, 1988, pp. 1-41
17. According to Lacan the Woman is a concept structurally impossible within the symbolic and is therefore aligned with the Real. Cf. Jacqueline Rose, 'Introduction II', in Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the 'école freudienne', New York, 1982, pp. 27-57
18. For a stimulating discussion of the obscene as an aesthetic and theoretical trope see Svetlana Boym, 'The Obscenity of Theory: Roland Barthes's "Soirées de Paris" and Walter Benjamin's Moscow Diary', The Yale Journal of Criticism, vol. 4, no. 2, 1991, pp. 105-28
19. See Kaja Silverman's discussion of the objet petit a in her essay 'The Lacanian Phallus', in Differences, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 1992, p. 92
20. Lacan, 'Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet', Yale French Studies, 55/56, 1977, pp. 11-52
21. Thus visually dis-mis-placing the conceptual alignment of Woman with the Real and lack. Specifically, Hatoum's installation may be seen to rewrite the Lacanian thesis that Woman 'does not exist' (i.e., does not exist as an object but could only be thought of in terms of the fold of the Real within the symbolic, or, as Žižek put it, as 'a materialization of a certain bar within the symbolic universe'. See Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do [London: Verso, 1991], p. 112.)
22. Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman and Judith Butler, among other feminist thinkers, emphasized the possibility of playing with the mask (or screen) as politically enabling. See Mary Anne Doane's important discussion of mask, masquerade and femininity in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, and Psychoanalysis, New York, 1991, chaps 1 & 2
23. and Butler, 'Lacan, Riviere and the Strategies of Masquerade', Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York, 1990, pp. 43-57
24. Roger Caillois, 'Mimicry and Legendary Psychastenia', October, 31, Winter 1984, pp. 17-32. (Later Lacan, who based his work on that of Caillois, inherits the drama.)
25. Cf. Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, 'The Sexual Masquerade: A Lacanian Theory of Sexual Difference', in E. Ragland-Sullivan and Mark Bracher (eds), Lacan and the Subject of Language, New York, 1991, p. 71
26. See Michel Foucault 'Of Other spaces', Diacritics, Spring 1986
27. To be sure, Sherman's project was, of course, no less critical. By comparing Connor to Sherman I merely want to foreground the shift of emphasis in these artists' critical strategies, and more generally, between the 1980s and the 1990s. I am arguing for the recognition of the return of the Real in the 1990s as a way of complicating the discourse of cultural construction. Connor's departure from or her complication of the concept of the masquerade as an important critical concept and strategy of the 1980s, is one example of what may be seen as renewed rather than dissipated energy of feminist discourse and practice in the 1990s. (For a worry about the recent decline of feminist art, and for different responses to such critical diagnosis of the 1990s, see Sylvia Kolbovski and Mignon Nixon 'Questions of Feminism: 25 Responses', published in the special issue on feminism of October, 71, Winter 1995.)
28. I find Parveen Adams's recent discussion on the critical dimension of Orlan's practice fascinating, but the practice itself remains for me unconvincing for the reasons which I have sought to make clear here. See 'Operation Orlan', The Emptiness of the Image. Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences, London and New York, 1996, pp. 141-59