I am mourning, at least I feel all the signs and symptoms of it. What I am mourning, though, is something I did not expect to mourn: my relationship with my analyst. I have missed two would-be sessions. The thing is, we had been planning to stop since our return to normal after the summer break so it did not come as a surprise, especially to me, who initiated the process. You see, committing time and money to the sessions, those two things Freud considers essential to the work of analysis, had become impossible for me. That doesn’t mean I did not care. In fact, most of the important work in my analysis happened between September and January, the months of the End of Analysis, as I call them in my clinical diary.

Issues of control, of deep pain and fear and frustration came up, the realisation that I feel something so true that part of me feels it’s wrong, such intensity… But Dr Sh— thinks that I would have left in a matter of months, no matter what. He was very kind to me during those difficult sessions. On the last one, he wishes me good fortune with my show and my PhD work (that’s what brought it all up, I am leaving analysis to do art, I am cured). It’s not a matter of luck, he said, but of fortune, and his door is open. In fact, he did not wish to see my work and said so, even though this is available online, because he is still my analyst. The work of analysis certainly does not finish with the last session. My symptoms have been stronger lately.

He told me he thought I left some things there with him. And I have, I think. But I have also taken some others with me, hence the mourning. In these last two weeks, I have thought to myself a couple of times: “oh, I must mention that to Dr Sh—, I wonder where it will take me…” only to realise a minute afterwards that there will not be another session in the near future. And that is sort of painful, emotionally straining, actually. The analysis room has become more vivid. The fireplace, the books, the deep green accoutrements, especially the Apple computer I only glimpse and smile at when I go in… They have taken a sort of childhood image status, like something vivid but far far away.

I did not want to lag with my last payment. I have an enormous sense of duty for my analyst because he has never been less than extremely professional. Once a transactional analyst actually went out of the consulting room where I was sitting, in order to answer a telephone. Dr Sh—, if he sees people out of the window, tells me he is going to draw the curtains so we get privacy. Of course, I do realise this is still strong transference. Let me go back to the payment. I tried to do it as quickly as possible, as I always do, but I also wanted to do something special, something small, not melodramantic (which is how I was feeling) but something that would mark the moment of that indefinite break. I wanted a postcard picture of Nicole Kidman, since she had featured so heavily in my last months of analysis (don’t ask), but this was impossible to find. So I turned to my faithful postcard collection which mainly contains works by Schiele, Kahlo and Duchamp (this, in itself, is telling). I chose a postcard with an image by Frida Kahlo, entitled “What I saw in the water”.

I wasn’t sure of why I chose that one at the time, although I knew nothing is deliberate, of course. But the more I think about it now, the more I realise that I do/did my best thinking in psychoanalysis and the bath and that both share a similar point of view. What I see in both is my feet, restful or restless, me laying down. This is the image of me thinking, or rather, working through. Actually that is what happens in the bath, I work through my research problems, I see in the water. Of course, there’s the body too, that body of mine that my year and a half of analysis help me not so much discover as locate, identify as mine (not someone else, as I thought).

I am glad to get a little bit of analysis post-analysis. Don’t be scared if, in the next few weeks or months, there’s some rambling here, about my mother, about self-harm, about feeling inadequate. Before you write it off as silly self-awareness, please remember I am mourning.

A wonderful moment at the Vicissitudes: Histories and destinies of Psychoanalysis conference’s French panel:

Stéphane le Mercier, artist:

9- …ce á quoi souvent il faut répondre:
«Que faites-vous dans la vie?
- Je reléve des chutes.»

9- … what I often have to answer:
«What do you do for a living?
-I pick up what has fallen down.»

Christine Anzieu-Premmereur, psychoanalyst:

Funny. You and me have the same job.

It has been a while. I have been a hermit, distanced from online activities, wholly immersed in constructing Chapter 1, figuring out A Case of Seduction (End Gallery 12-17 May 2008), attending a Psychoanalysis and the Arts and Humanities conference (Vicissitudes : Histories and Destinies of Psychoanalysis) and coping with the end of my analysis. I know, I know that each time I disappear for a while I come back with a list but I have had to put all of my energies on Chapter 1. It has felt like a milestone, with all the effort it takes to actually reach it. Literally, a PhD is like a marathon and I have had to concentrate on putting one foot forward, and then the other and so one, not tripping, advancing a little at a time. And not to mention a really traumatic Christmas period, of course, from which I wish I could have taken some holiday. Alas, I had Masters assessments on 7th January.

I will write about all of those things I mentioned, in particular the end of analysis, once the mourning period eases my throat. I missed being here. Like Sh. and F. mentioned to me at The Freud Museum last Saturday, blogging is a particular form of writing that suits only some people. To me, it is like tidying my desk, or filing my stuff… I tell you what, I really need to clear some things. The mess has really accumulated while I had my guard down.

The analytic vignettes I listened to at the APCS conference were eye openers in relation to a problem I have encountering with my PhD. My sessions are going somewhere (where, I don’t know yet) and my clinical diary. for as long as I kept it, was a useful tool in relation to establishing parallels between artistic and analytic practices.

The trouble began when it was time to think about this endeavour as a public one and I had to conceive of what had gone on as a piece of writing. I did not know where to start. How could I write a PhD involving my own desire without doing written self analysis? How could I avoid replicating what had gone on in the sessions verbatim? How could I be fair to the process without including insights gained post facto? How could I avoid being too personal? How could I avoid being too irrelevant? How could I gain some distance without being objective? How could I keep subjectivity relevant? These and many, many more question I asked while my fingers froze on the keyboard; this has gone on weekly since September and what you are reading are the first words that are typed about it.

The plenary panel ‘Psychoanalysis Under Fire: Kleinian, Winnicottian, Lacanian and Relational Theory and Practice, Part II’ at the last APCS conference, chaired by Esther Rashkin (University of Utah) and comprised by Kate Briggs (University of West Georgia), Marilyn Charles (Austen Riggs Center), Karl Figlio (University of Essex), and Lynne Layton (Editor, Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society) was very useful in relation to my blockage. All presenters spoke, during two 5 minutes interventions with question intervals, about a clinical encounter.

In the best Freudian fashion, I felt the genre of case history was alive, ever compelling and relevant. There were insights and thinking (despite Figlio’s concerns with thinking) but also theories, sources, process, engagement, and, often, change. This is not new, though. When Freud wrote Dora, or Ratman these different types of content were intermingled, and he would even tell you were and how. But I must be too used to reading Freud, or must think of Freud as not alive, as cristallised, in terms of writing.

The case histories at APCS made me realise what the structure for the case history is, and what I had been doing wrong when conceiving the writing of my own: all of those encounters, and all of Freud’s histories were the result of transference and counter-transference. That is, they were relational: analyst-analysand-[supervisor].

I realised that, although Dr Sh— met with me weekly in the analytic room, I left him there when writing the PhD thesis, and so I wrote him off the case history. But, if with my photographs I aim to provoke a particular encounter between viewer and artwork, the parallel was not to work in the thesis if I shunted what stands in in the place of the artwork. My analytic process had not been a self analysis and trying to write it as one just wouldn’t work. Perhaps I had been wishing for emotional, artistic and academic independence (we are, after all considering the end of analysis). Still, if I am to write a clinical vignette in the spirit of Dora and with the energy of what I heard at the APCS, the analyst and the artwork must be acknowledged and given voice within the writing.

Isn’t Donnie Darko an amazing film? Such a beautiful portrayal of unconscious processes, 80s music (Love will tear us apart…), paranoic behaviour, teenage love, phantasy, trauma, the hope of therapy, the imaginary, the social bond, educational philosophies and politics, and science fiction. It’s so inspiring, I could watch it over and over again (I mean, Grandma Death!). There is also a link to be made between Donnie Darko and Inland Empire, with its exploration of the unconscious and the rabbits… When I am done with this bit of research I am engaged in, I should return to explore this. Does anyone know good books/papers I shouldn’t miss?

Now that I managed to catch up and feel sort of back on track (my job does not take it well when I am away from my desk), I have a little time to reflect and write about my trip to the US.

I came back from the APCS energized and full of thoughts. Our panel on Almodovar had the right level of engagement and controversy and showing the film beforehand meant everyone was engaged and had something to contribute to. I took notes and had many thoughts, which will hopefully inform a developed paper, with the issue of cryptophores (bearers of secrets, Vita) fully explored. My remarks for the panel, though, can be found here.

The whole conference was congenial. I was particularly encouraged by the level of discussion between academics and clinicians, and between people from different disciplines but with a common interest in psychoanalysis. The visual definitely has a place in the conference, one that I hope will be explored more and more. As Martin Gliserman said, after all, we talk about a primal scene.

There are many things I learned and could talk about, but one, in particular, has stayed with me since and plays around in my head. It is a visual thought verbalised by Elio Frattaroli, in a panel on psychoanalytic wars entitled Pax Psychoanalytica: Analysis is like the Titanic and all the analyst can do is arrange deck chairs to get a better view of the iceberg. A beautiful twist on a deja-vu metaphor.

S— said it was because they operated like eyes, which looked and saw. I agreed. She mentioned Lacan’s quote: “You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see.” (Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton, 1978, p. 103) and some of that is true of the 140 new images I have made depicting reflections in shoe shop fronts, jewelry windows, lingerie displays and bridal-wear.

I also think fantasy has something to do with it. Whereas, in my images, shoe and lingerie shops demand consumption, bridal shops and jewelers are more contemplative. As so they belong to the imaginary of seduction, rather to the actual seduction shops represent these days. Of course, prohibitive prices and the social meaning attributed to those objects have a bearing in this matter. The tension represented in those photos is less “buy me” than “have me, if you dare”, a possession not achieved by purchasing the object, but by owning it and relating to it through phantasy. That’s why these images have trapped me, captured my imaginary.

I had always dreamed of my encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s Étant Donnés and my visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, from where it has not been moved since its installation in 1969, was worth the 30 year wait. I could write all sorts of interpretations about my experience and what I saw. Psychoanalysis lends itself particularly well, due to its dada and surrealism connections, its relationship to gaze and its portrayal of the body. I am going to restrict myself, however, to a phenomenological account of the event into which, no doubt, psychoanalysis will creep in, as this is the intellectual territory most of my work occupies.

Étant Donnés is in room 183, a dark space confined to the far end of the museum and, from its location, joins Duchamp other masterpieces: The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even) with the corresponding Green Box notes and the infamous Richard Mutt signed original urinary, entitled Fountain.

The first things that leaves me begging, as I sit in the adjacent room 182, anticipating , is its title: Étant Donnés: 1. La chute d’eau 2 Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall 2. The illuminating gas). Given… what is given? Is there anything that is going to be given to me? Perhaps the Green Box writings can come in useful here:

Notice
Given: 1st the waterfall
[in the dark]
If, given 2nd the illuminating gas,

in the dark, we shall determine (the conditions for) the extra rapid exposition (=allegorical appearance) of several conditions seeming strictly to succeed each other according to certain laws, in order to isolate the Sign of the accordance between this extra rapid exposition (capable of all excentricities) on the one hand and the choice of the possibilities aithorised by these laws on the other.

There is more to this title, though, in the same way that there is more to L.H.O.O.Q. than 5 letters. I can’t help but see Thanatos, in the form of an epitaph: Is Duchamp giving us his body of works? Is the body in Given dead or about to die?

Duchamp worked on Étant Donnés for 20 years, during which most of the world thought he had completely abandoned art to play chess. Like the latter game, Étant Donnés represents an individual encounter with the artwork; a group of people, small as it may be, would be pressed to see it exactly at the same time. With this thought, and prepared for a punning game of chess –as I know something of Duchamp’s work), I leave the ready-mades and paintings of room 182 to venture yonder. And like in any great adventure, there are a number of obstacles I have to address. The first one, often forgotten, is one I had overcome: to see Étant Donnés one has to go all the way to Philadelphia to see the work. In a late capitalist world, where art tours like rockstars or freaks, blockbuster shows are traded and permanent collections are dessemated by loans, pilgrimages (instead of visits to tourist attractions) to the comfortable and specially designed home of a piece is unheard of.

The second obstacle is a constitutive part of the piece. In the darkness of room 183, one is first encountered by a wooden door, which Duchamp had sent from Spain. This is mounted on to the wall, with handsome bricks forming an arch at its upper part. The door is not any door, however. This is a door without handle, a door that is visibly not for opening and closing. This may be one of the reasons, why visitors to the Philadelphia Museum of Art that make it all the way to the end of the Modern and Contemporary Art galleries turns around barely after entering room 183. I took great pleasure in observing this. My mind, however, thought of another possible reason. With Priere de Toucher, Fountain, Comb, Paris Air, With Hidden Noise and Why Not Sneeze Rose Sélavy? amongst others in the adjacent room, a keen but uninformed visitor cannot be blamed for thinking that Étant Donnés is also a ready-made. Either that, or doors just put people off, which could also be.

The third obstacle Étant Donnés presents is only applicable to people like me. This is not highlight a gender issue –which is also present but much more delicately than what has often be discussed as we will see later– an economic, or a racial one. No. As a 4ft 10″ human being, I am talking of height. After having travelled half way across the world and learned, for over 15 years, about the Avant Garde, and in particular Duchamp, there I was, helpless, unable to reach the holes on the door. Indeed, Étant Donnés does hot have a handle, but, upon careful inspection, one observes that it is metaphorically hinged upon two little holes, around which the wood has changed colour, no doubt due to the brea(d)th (this time literal and also figurative) of visitors. I couldn’t believe it. I jumped: I saw a leg. I jumped again: oh, how light and colourful. This wasn’t working. I took out my digital camera (the museum allows photographs without flash in most of its rooms) and extended my arms up, clicking through the holes. Did I come here to see an image, a second rate, shaky, representation?

Tired and jet-lagged, I was ready to give up. I stomped back into light and airy 182, where a bored gallery assistant was sitting. No, she giggled, she did not have anything I could stand on –even though we were sitting a particularly apt bench, but my pleas, travel dramas, life-long dreams only added to her boredom. I was not even worthy of a glinting eye, a keeping of that moment in the memory to later relate to friends how museums are magnets for weirdos. Nothing. Who cared about art, anyway? I stamped back to 183, decided to perfect my jumping technique with a full Jane Fonda routine, if needed. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was even prepared to ask somebody to lift me (body contact with strangers is the ultimate resort) when I had an idea.

As a tiny person, I tend to wear respectable heels, and, although not respectable enough for this occasion, doubling their height would suffice. So I took off one shoe and stood on one leg and two shoes. Just in case, I also propped myself with my bag. Who cared if my 46 kilos smashed my mobile telephone, iPod and laptop? I was a step closer, and that’s what mattered. I could reach now, with holding by one legged body with the help of the Spanish door, with the help of art. The irritating third obstacle was conquered.

The last obstacle is the most disconcerting. This piece is viewed from a single and specific point of view, through holes. I wasn’t prepared for the fact that Étant Donnés is clearly a work about gaze and looking. My complete bafflement at something so evident (what else could I have been expecting?) might have been because I had never really seen the piece before. There is a reproduction of The Large Glass in London’s Tate Modern, which I regularly visited and knew so well. Étant Donnés was completely new. Whereas The Large Glass is a transparent, free-standing structure that can be viewed from any point, Étant Donnés limits the view. Moreover, the viewer is completely excluded from the scene, only partly seeing it from the outside, although even that last word is contentious. Where are we in relation to the Spanish door? In or out? Enclosed or excluded? Or both?

What one can see through the holes has been well documented, but the strong experiential content of the piece requires I do it again, if only for my own sanity. After the holes is thick darkness –a darkness I learn in books is velvet lined. Then bricks; bricks arranged so that there they form a casual but meticulously arranged gap though which I peep at the scene. The [primal?] scene is brightly lit, which immediately challenges the shadow accustomed eyes. A bucolic landscape, apparently painted and reminiscent of the backdrop of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, with a waterfall giving the illusion of running gives way, in the front, to a bed of [real] twigs which support a naked body, only partially visible, which holds the illuminating gas, which does just that, illuminate. I know this scene so well, yet it feels so strange. Nothing goes with anything, yet, it has some sort of unity.

Apart from being a piece about gaze and looking, it is also about what we cannot see.
I found myself more preoccupied with what I couldn’t see, than with what was given to me. I wanted to see the head of the woman, even though I knew that, no matter how much or how I moved, I would not be able to. (Is there one, anyway?)

So why is this piece not about the gendered body? After all, are we not looking at a naked lady? Or are we? I was only too aware of the theories around the bulging genitalia of the naked body, the question of hermaphroditism, and the feelings of throbbing fleshiness felt by some intellectual and critical viewers in relation to the unreal landscape in the background. I must say, my impression is that this body, instead of referring us to a body, points towards a history of representation.

Of course, the references to dioramas, and peep shows, and the teasing of vision within these is literally present in Étant Donnés but apart from presenting us with our gaze, and converting us into objects in the same way those contraptions and entertainment venues do, this is an installation about a particular kind of looking: looking at art. Evidencing this is its discussion, in visual form, of the two main subjects of the history of art –particularly painting–: the nude and the landscape; and its exploration of different media:sculpture, painting, chiaroscuro, photography, assemblage, time-based media, conceptual art –remember the title–. Funny enough, though, Étant Donnés cannot be represented, either in words or images, as in and out cannot be viewed at the same time. It cannot be photographed as a whole. It is an experience in sequence, a little like a film, but one in which the viewer acts on, or lives). Even the shop’s clever idea for the unavoidable postcard –a telling of the experience through lenticular photography– misses a point.

Given continues to baffle Duchamp scholars some of whom find it difficult to place within his work. There have been theories around Given being a three dimensional representation of The Large Glass (see, for example, Paz, 2003), as some of the themes are re-worked in the piece (not least the bride, stripped bare) and they both share elements articulated in The Green Box. Perhaps. I am sure there is a thread there although I see it more like a beginning of a critical position than an end in itself: of course Given could be articulated in the context of The Large Glass, but it also references a number of other Duchamp works. For some critics, Given means a come back to (some would say a step back) representation. But, as Judovitz (1995) points out, this is not a negation of ready-mades and conceptualism; rather, Given takes Duchamp’s groundbreaking ideas to their extreme: is Philadelphia Museum of Art not a ready-made, when looked at through the holes of the Spanish door?

References:
Ades, D; Cox, N & Hopkins, D. (1999) Marcel Duchamp. London: Thames and Hudson

Duchamp, M; Sanouillet, M & Peterson, E eds. (1989) The writings of Marcel Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press

Joselit, D (1998) Modern Machines: From the Virgin to the Widow. In Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp 1910-1941. Cambridge, MA; London: MIT Press

Judovitz, D (1995) Rendez-vous with Marcel Duchamp: Given. In Unpacking Duchamp. Art in Transit. Berkeley, CA ; London: University of California Press

Paz, O. (2003) Apariencia Desnuda: La obra de Marcel Duchamp. Madrid: Alianza Editorial.

I have updated the website with shiny new lightboxes and have uploaded some of the new photographs I took over the summer. In preparation for the printing work I have ahead of me (and the exhibition in April/May), I thought I should publish them in order to gain some distance, and to encounter them in some form.