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Reviews

Brian Grosskurth Ivan Gaskell Emma Barker Asia Haut Simon Kelly Leslie Topp David Evans

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Reviews

Mourning and Mimesis

Brian Grosskurth

Margaret Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, ISBN-13 978-0-271-02971-9 204 pp., 24 colour and 12 b&w illns. paperback ISBN 978-0-271-02971-9, 31.86 On a bright February morning in 1979, Roland Barthes ` announced to his Saturday audience at the College de France that he was going to die. This was a somewhat startling claim, if one discounted the classic syllogism of mortality: apart from some unmistakable signs of mild melancholia, Barthes had seemed in remarkably good health. Yet the insistence in the inimitable grain of that voice was unanswerable. In one sense, this abrupt statement should have come as no surprise. In the preceding weeks, death had repeatedly punctuated Barthes discourse. While ostensibly speaking of haiku and the labyrinth, he would invariably return to the subject of his mother, her death and, less often, his own eventual disparition. It was during this same period that Barthes was engaged in preparing his nal book on mourning, death, and the photograph, Camera Lucida. In her brilliant study, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes, Margaret Iversen introduces the notion of antimourning. Rather than severing attachments as in successful mourning, anti-mourning embodies an ongoing opening of the wound of loss. Within the image, this incision traces an irreducible ssure across the seemingly homogeneous space of the visible. Iversen goes on to relate anti-mourning to Barthes text on photography. Yet on a more general level of analysis, antimourning constitutes a central and exemplary gure in the logic of heterogeneity which Iversen repeatedly seeks in the work of art. The central argument of Iversens book contends that psychoanalytic theory has much to tell us about the work of art and our range of aesthetic response. Yet this is not, she argues, in the hackneyed context of psychobiography nor in the dispiriting frame of sublimation, but rather within the problematic of late Freudian and Lacanian concepts, the Freud of the death drive and the Lacan of the real. In developing a psychoanalytic aesthetic beyond pleasure, Iversen focuses on a series of heterogeneous gures: the uncanny; the anamorphic; the encounter; the death drive; mourning; and the punctum as objet petit a. Each of these elements in different ways disrupts the seemingly homogeneous fabric of the aesthetic space, whether conceived of as Kants harmonious free play of the faculties or as a realisation of the pleasure principle, the homeostatic restoration of equilibrium. In advancing this argument, she rejects a certain appropriation of

Lacan in art and lm theory of the 1970s and 1980s which privileged the imaginary and symbolic as vectors of ideological subjection. According to this earlier approach, the mirror stage constitutes a model of ideological moulding and misrecognition, while the order of the signier functions as the conduit of the interpellation of power. With these Althusserian assumptions, one could then conceive of artistic practices which disrupt prevailing symbolic and imaginary models of social representation. Far more interesting, in Iversens view, are those elements of the real, the unsymbolised domain at the limit of language and image, which produce ssures, tears, and blind elds within the very texture of representation itself. While the imaginary and the symbolic are central elements, the gaps, rifts, and distortions enacted by the real are a much more compelling domain of investigation. Iversen begins with an incisive chapter on Edward Hopper and the uncanny. Rather than conning her analysis to an examination of uncanny motifs in Hoppers work or presenting the latter as a mere illustration of Freuds essay, however, she considers how this unsettling blurring of the familiar and unfamiliar, the anticipated and the strange, affects Hoppers modes of depiction and presentation. The blind eld as a localised eclipse of vision within the eld of representation, a cropping enacted by spatial or temporal factors, destabilises the parameters of orientation. Two further chapters examine Lacans relationship with ` the surrealists through a focus on Dal and Breton. Iversen rightly argues that this is an area that demands more sustained investigation. In specic terms, she ` demonstrates the close links between Lacan and Dal, not only through a common interest in the structures of paranoia, but also, most decisively for the later Lacan, through the surrealist artists obsession with anamorphic distortion, the transformation of stable form into an unnameable, shapeless mass which realigns itself when seen from a certain angle. She explores the parallel preoccupation of both Breton and Lacan with the missed encounter as a touchstone of the real. In this context, she convincingly challenges some of the more reductive readings of Bretons conception of surrealist experience as the unication of opposing poles. In her reading, the tensions and contradictions in Bretons work remain unresolved, despite the writers strenuous efforts to the contrary. The chapter on Robert Smithson is particularly fascinating. Rather than arbitrarily casting a net of psychoanalytic concepts over the work, Iversen demonstrates in Smithsons project an already existing preoccupation with the death drive as dedifferentiation, a notion derived from the artists reading of Anton Ehrenzweig. In this vein, Iversen interprets Spiral Jetty as a guration of the death drive in which the undulating, curving rhythms of the work enact an entropic logic. At this juncture, one might wonder if the concept of guration could have been more fully developed. It is a commonplace that the Freudian death drive is inimical and
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# The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved.

Reviews resistant to representation and presentation as such. If this is the case, how then is its guration conceivable or possible? The associations with gure and gurative would suggest a mimetic element, although this might be argued to be an instance of mimesis without resemblance: the imitation of the death drive is, ultimately, a mimesis of nothing or, at most, an annihilation and dissolution of which the abstract gure is no more than an approximate cipher. Yet while Iversen gives us some compelling insights into Smithsons work, this problem itself is not directly addressed. The subsequent chapter on Maya Lin raises different questions. While there is much to admire in Iversens analysis, I was troubled by her initial insistence on a problematic which links architecture and fetishism. These are large, expansive claims which roundly correlate the male childs castration anxiety with architecture as a fetishistic supplement and mask for all manner of absence and trauma. Fortunately, Iversen does not pursue this line of thought which in its abbier manifestations leads to the identication of skyscrapers as phallic symbols. Instead, she pursues the much more interesting and convincing path of examining Maya Lins monument as a work of mourning or, as I indicated earlier, anti-mourning. Here, Iversen might have usefully considered certain arguments of Derrida who seems to be somewhat dismissively alluded to in the book (quite wrongly, in my view) as a typical postmodern. Derrida suggests that mourning is characterised by an ineluctable structural failure: successful mourning, in its closure and severing, betrays the loss through introjection and dissolution achieved by way of ritual, remembrance, and representation. Impossible mourning, in contrast, must remain irreducibly faithful to a loss which resists mimetic appropriation. Similarly, Derridas work on the spectre and its links with history and justice might have been useful at this juncture, less as an abstract argument than as a way of developing an analysis of the historical and political implications of the veterans memorial. In this regard, I found Iversens account of the historical background too summary. She characterises the post-Vietnam era in broad strokes as an epoch of general denial of national trauma. Yet the historical evidence is contradictory to say the least. While there is much material which supports this interpretation, there were strong counter-tendencies within American culture of the 1980s. One need only think of the ood of bigbudget Hollywood movies on Vietnam and the post-Vietnam era, works spanning the entire ideological spectrum, which reached mass audiences during that decade. Indeed, a recurrent theme of these movies was the imperative not to forget, whether framed in conservative terms of loyalty to ones fellow Americans abandoned in the jungles of southeast Asia or in a left liberal insistence on national guilt and expiation. I was also somewhat puzzled by the fact that while Iversen states that she cannot speak authoritatively about the mourners experience at the wall, she immediately proceeds 302 OXFORD ART JOURNAL 32.2 2009 to present a normative scenario of that very experience: These distraught mourners nd consolation in the symbolization of their grief [and] . . . emerge better reconciled to the necessity of relinquishing the dead and, indeed, a measure of their own grief. Yet this large claim is made without evidence and, equally problematically, appears to step back from her earlier move to consider the wall as a monument of anti-mourning. The latter strikes me as a more interesting and original vein of argument, one which, moreover, would account for much of the continuing power of that monument. Questions of mourning and anti-mourning are pursued in the subsequent chapter on Barthes. Iversen very aptly shows how central Lacans seminar on the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis of 1964 is to Barthes later analysis of photography. In particular, she demonstrates how closely the photographic punctum is related to the Lacanian objet petit a, that lost object of the real which surfaces in the wake of linguistic symbolisation as the recalcitrant object-cause of desire. The poignant stab of the punctum in the image, either as the small, elusive detail or as the catastrophic temporality of the future anterior she will have vanished is haunted by desire as circling around lack and absence. Yet while Iversen wittily reads Barthes text, at least in part, as a work of autobiographical ction, she also sees it as a work of mourning. Indeed, she suggests: perhaps the act of writing the book was a way of symbolically marking her passing and letting her go. I might be inclined to disagree. As an undergraduate, I attended Barthes lectures at the time when he was writing Camera Lucida and, as I indicated earlier, he was far from willing to let go. I would tend to read the book instead as an exercise in what Iversen herself calls anti-mourning, or what Derrida has termed impossible mourning, in which absence remains irreducible, irreconcilable and, ultimately, unrepresentable to a degree that frustrates all attempts at symbolic marking. More compelling in this context is Iversens rereading of the punctum. Rather than being a mere subjective projection, as some commentators have claimed, the punctum as gaze lies on the side of the object: it unexpectedly emanates from the work, piercing the viewer from oblique and unforeseen angles. Far from being conned to the photograph alone, the logic of the punctum as objet petit a can be seen as operative in all compelling works of art. Lacan suggested this line of argument as early as 1960 when he claimed that behind the visible surface of the work, there is the Thing as the gaping void of the drives; while two years later, in the seminar on anxiety, he argued that it is the objet petit a, oating elusively in the space of the Thing, which gazes invisibly at the viewer. Mention of these two seminars raises the question of Iversens choices. For the most part, she tends to focus on Seminar XI of 1964. Yet while this is undoubtedly one of the richest and most rewarding of Lacans seminars, one wonders why issues raised in some of the

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Reviews earlier and later seminars were bypassed. One central question is the concept of beauty which forms the focus of an extensive discussion by Lacan in the seminar on ethics. In a session on the death drive, he denes beauty as the barrier that halts the subject before desire as the eld of absolute destruction. It is because the truth of desire as death drive cannot be looked at that beauty forms its cover of dazzling splendour. In this sense, beauty possesses a protective as well as a cosmetic function insofar as it constitutes the limit resisting the silent, destructive, entropic forces. Later in his commentary on Antigone, Lacan presents the beauty of the heroine in relation to the limit which she crosses in entering the space between the two deaths. In tracing a relation between beauty and a radical alterity which is both its precondition and its limit, Lacan blurs distinctions between the beautiful and sublime. By the same token, he implicitly problematises the entire question of aesthetic pleasure. One remains curious as to how Margaret Iversen will approach this problem in her next book. In the meantime, Beyond Pleasure stands as a considerable and signicant achievement.
doi:10.1093/oxartj/kcp027

The Singularity of Sculpture

Ivan Gaskell

Roberta Panzanelli (ed.), Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, with a translation of Julius von Schlossers History of Portraiture in Wax (translation by James Michael Loughridge), (Getty Research Institute: Los Angeles, 2008), 336 pp., 34 colour and 93 b/w illns, hardback 31, ISBN 978-0-89236-877-8. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age, translation by Chris Miller (Getty Research Institute: Los Angeles, 2008), 232 pp., 16 colour and 23 b/w illns, 22 hardback, ISBN 978-0-89236-892-1. The appearance of two publications from the Getty Research Institute that between them offer fresh insights into Western sculpture might encourage us to reconsider its character in a time of rapid conceptual change. Sculpture currently encompasses a very wide range of things in many media, from James Turrells massive Roden Crater, an earthwork excavated from an extinct volcano, to Bethan Huwss tiny boats, each made from a single reed. In the institutional artworld (to use George Dickies term), such variety has not always been the case. Until the early twentieth century, artworld members predominantly conceived of sculpture as consisting of a limited range of object types derived from precedents in

Mediterranean classical antiquity. Accepted materials were few, largely conned to several stones (including various marbles), clay, some metals (notably bronze), bone, ivory, and several woods. Subject matter was dominated by the human form. However, viewed from a global perspective, a Veit Stoss altarpiece and a Canova mythology are remarkably similar in terms of their underlying premises. Received opinion holds that things changed only in the early twentieth century, when some Western artists challenged normative notions of what constitutes art. This occurred in two principal modes. One consists in artists appropriation from within contemporary Western material culture of, in Arthur Dantos words, mere real things. The standard example is Fountain, a pseudonymously signed urinal that Marcel Duchamp unsuccessfully attempted to exhibit in New York in 1917. (Alfred Stieglitzs photograph of it, published in the magazine The Blind Man in May, 1917, made it known.) The second mode of challenge to prevailing norms was some artists embrace of the so-called primitive by appropriating forms from colonially subjugated societies, predominantly in Oceania and sub-Saharan Africa. Many point to Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso among artists as taking the lead in expanding the Western repertory in response to the arts of these places. Some collectors and scholars also adopted indigenous art. Dealers and curators throughout the twentieth century took masquerades from African, Melanesian, Pacic coast Native American, and other indigenous societies, and stripped them of their bre and other extraneous components to reduce them so as to conform as far as possible to Western patterns of clean-cut carving: the mask. Even if such appropriation was largely supersessive, in that Western concerns overrode any signicance such things might have had for indigenous makers and users, a true expansion of Western sculptural norms came about, for, if a Veit Stoss and a Canova are close to one another, neither is close in terms of underlying premises even those of Western appropriators to a Kongo nkisi gure, or a Biwat ute stopper. Western artists, scholars, and collectors not only re-evaluated the previously denigrated idols and fetishes of colonized indigenous peoples, they began to look at the aspects of their own previously ignored cultural traditions. They explored beyond the narrow range of Western artefacts related to an equally narrow range of material from Mediterranean classical antiquity that their predecessors had assumed sculpture to be. For instance, as well as nding inspiration in the displays of African art he saw in the Musee dEthnographie in the Palais du Trocadero, Paris from 1907 onwards, Picasso emulated Iberian folk sculpture, notably the recently excavated pre-Roman Iberian reliefs from Osuna and Cerro de los Santos, Spain, exhibited at the Musee du Louvre in the previous year. The primitive, wherever it was to be found whether among subjugated peoples beyond Europe, in Europes deep past, or in the products
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