PAINTING AND THE REAL

DAVID LONGWILL

BA FINE ART

CONTENTS
Introduction........................................................................................................P.2 Chapter 1: Symptom and Painting.....................................................................P.3 Chapter 2: Albert Ohelan and the Symbolic Real..............................................P.4 Chapter 3: Perro Del Fransico and the Imaginary Real.....................................P.5 Chapter 4: Francis Bacon's libidinal economy...................................................P.5 Chapter 5: Bauer and the abject Real.................................................................P.6 Conclusion .....................................................................................................P.7

Abstract

In this writing I am examining though Lacanian thought the act of painting as it pertains to the real. I am attempting to examine what is vital about painting. These is under the framework of Lacanian thought, and how a painters actions are inscribed into the main areas of the imaginary, symbolic and most vitally the Real. In short how can painting approach freedom?

Introduction

What defines the analyst? I have said it. I have always said it, always simply, no one has ever understood anything, and what is more, it is natural, it is not my fault I have always said, analysis is what one expects from a psychoanalyst. But this what one expects from a psychoanalyst - we obviously have to try to comprehend what that means. It is so much there, like that, within hands reach I have the feeling all the same, always, that I am only restating it the work is for me, the surplus enjoying is for you (Lacan 1968) Though talking of psychoanalytic practice Lacan could easily be describing the relation of the artist , his work and the audience, who acquire the surplus enjoyment. This surplus enjoyment is what cannot be captured by a symbolic structure but paradoxically it necessary for the structure itself. It is this enjoy-meant of floating signifier which is the real in the illusion, and shows an element within a set that is greater than the set itself. If a painter struggles after truth it is in the painted canvas where he submits to castration, he delineates a symbolic space for himself on the canvas and the gap between that and how he perceives himself is the castrating experience. However it is only through this that we get a leftover element of the real, the 'lamella' or labido, so the two play a game ,castration: 'designates the precedence of the empty place over the contingent elements filling it. (Zizek 2005) and the libido of the painter fills the empty space of the canvas or rather he must circulate around this empty space. When Lacan says 'that every truth has the structure of fiction. ' (Lacan 1959-60) he refers to the truth in the masks we wear, it is a mask of truth. A distraction, but a distraction that contains the truth in the form of a lie. There is no true self behind it, in this way the truth needs this void to suggest something more, because as lacan says 'I always tell the truth, just not the whole truth, there aren't enough words' The artist in the same sense must live with this void or exanimate 'thing'. The maternal gaze that through its look generates a nostalgia for the mother child dyad He enters into a game of showing and hiding which suggests more

than can be scopically devoured. As in the case of the trompe l'oeil of the ancient Greek Zeuxis which in a challenge by artist friend Parrhasius to see who was the greatest artist. Zeuxis painted fruit so real that the birds came down to peck at it. Parrhasius in response painted a curtain so real it looked as if it was hiding a picture beyond it.

Chapter 1
Painting is an act, an act that belies the real, in psychoanalytical term its is a symptom, the symptom is the truth/real of the subject making itself known in the subject, the things he doesn't know that he knows (Zizek 2004), the unconscious real returns makes effects upon the subject. This real though comes in the form of a misdirection, an imaginary space which is a lure or trap, an attempt to present what is unrepresentative by creating a symbolic language that fits this empty space, to suggest there is something behind these smears of paint on canvas when infact it is the void of the detached gaze caught in its desire to see. Painting in this way is a symptom for the painter, he must identify with and enjoy this symptom, he must formulate his truth through his (it's) constructed language, he must find the symbolic language that is charged with desire. Lacan in his exclamations on art insisted on rising the work of art to the dignity of symbolic discourse and above the imaginary and ocular perception of it However in the formulation of his desire he relies upon the position of 'the thing' which is symbolically represented in his work The thing is essentially a void which the painter covers up with his fundamental fantasy, a lie which points to the truth, it is the gap inherent in the symbolic order given to the subject in his separation from the maternal thing with the cut of language, and it is only from the position of this gap that we gain access to truth of our desire. (Lacan 1968) For the subject to be integrated into society he must be situated within the symbolic order which structures how he has access to his desire. (Zizek 2006) This desiring subject is both constitutive of the other and the lack in the other, and becomes a mean of 'stitching' these two together. In this the artist is is radically othered in that he attempts to 'leap over the wall of language' (Levine, 2008) to en frame the vital, primordial, lack that the subject covers with the phallic which is at the same time a transgression of the symbolic frame and constitutive of the order itself. In an emancipatory sense the artist in his inscriptions of a symbolic language in paint produces a horizon of freedom from the desire of the other, he throws up the painting as a kind of smoke screen to hide the shame of his primordial lack. Freud In his writings on art described the sublimation of painting, suggesting that the lost 'thing' of the mothers gaze was captured in the look of Leonardo's obsessive subject the virgin and child, Lacan however in his analysis of the The Virgin and Child with St. Anne (Leonardo da Vinci 1508) rather saw no 'blissful reconstituting of the mothers gaze, rather he place the emphasis on the law of the father as the active role present in the symbolic phallus of the lamb,which replaces the imaginary phallus of the mother with the symbolic phallus of the father. The trinity of Anne, Mary and Jesus replaced with the trinity of God Son and father. In a drawing of this painting Leonardo presented the Jesus as 'springing forth from between his mothers legs' as Freud wrote of it, and he noted how the figures swam into each other in a dreamlike formation, this was Freud' focus, Lacan notes how Anne points to the heavens in a phallic gesture, though it is a matter of blind faith that the symbolic phallus is present as compared to the imaginary phallus of the mother which fades in and out. (Levine 2008) The playful Jesus and the role of Christ which Jesus is bound to adopt, is also the rule of his castration. Rather than explicitly concentrating on the interplay of gazes over the generations of the holy family, Lacan shows how the pointed finger of the grandmother St Anne points upwards to the heavens, guaranteeing the 'names of the father' and cut of language as the absolute law, 'in the beginning there was the word'. This mark or stain of initial word marks the castration and limit of enjoyment and also perpetuates it, through meaningless 'enjoy-meant' (An example of Lacans frequent wordplay) The artist is working in the area of the screen, the place of phantasms and symbolic structuring, in a sense he becomes the screen he has to situate himself outside of himself, in the course of painting he empties

himself and becomes a kind of void but it is this radical negativity which places the artist in the anxious space and compels action. The canvas in this sense becomes the screen for acting or the site of the act. (See image 6) However there is always a gap between the imagined act and the one enacted in the same way that there is gap between the imagined body image and the actual 'abject body of the real.' (Hal Foster:1996) The painter attempts to over come this gap, either though some transcendent sublime notion or perhaps though a radical acceptance of the abject, of an impoverished art. The kernel of the real is a subject that paradoxically has no substance it is felt through its affects rather like gravity. It never actually exists now but rather retroactively makes its presence felt, in the case of trauma it that which cannot but symbolised, or properly integrated into symbolic consciousness. So something that doesn't fit into the formal curved space of the subjects symbolic structure, then a piece of the real is taken to fit it, so that the imbalance In the case of a child that witnesses parental intercourse for example, at the time he will be confused but at the time will not understand, later it becomes integrated into his emerging sexuality often affecting the space of his fundamental fantasy curving it, in the way of gravity. This was seen in Freuds patient 'Wolfman', who tried to answer the question of 'Who am I?' with the primal scene of the parental coitus, being present at ones of inception, of course this is impossible and creates a deadlock which generates anxiety of the real. (Zizek 2004)

Chapter 2
In the paintings of Albert Oehlan he constructs a language that is hovering between representation and abstraction. At times an object it delineated, and appears to occupy a space but is interrupted by a colour field or thrown into an abstract space by its placement on the canvas. The important element of his painting is the process of selection and omission. In 'Piece' (See image 1) he uses blank space, biomorphic forms which are suggestive internal body space to create an inter-space of suggestive forms and symbolic colour. The paintings seems to relies on affects of a kind of splitting or montage of colour and protean forms. To me it is suggestive of 'the real' in Lacanian thought which has no symbolic form but its presence has 'affects' it is defined by what is omitted as such is this painting. The cuts in the painting create the montage effect and create new metaphorical meaning, Zizek in his essay "The Hitchcockian Blot" uses Freudian terms to describe various filmaking techniques, particularly that of montage. In Anal montage as opposed to oral (where the flow of images is homogeneous) what we get is a heterogeneous flow of images that split the narrative but has the effect of things happening spontaneously. I think Ohelan uses unclear metaphorical tensions to create a visual poetry. He creates a language that is most affected by what is not there. Oehlen use of colour here, and twisted natural forms on the right of the composition seem to twist and breakdown as we read the painting right to left, as the dominant green form forces us to read it. In the top right of the composition the green darkens and seems to en-frame some sort of scene from which the abject forms arise, the bilious yellow that emerges seems to suggest some remnant even though we can see that the ground of the canvas is blank, the background itself is the void and these elements are attempts at new forms of signification that incorporate the anxiety of the whiteness and the 'Thing' that questions our desire. In the case of the artist the gaze becomes the Thing, the gaze of all previous artists, the mortifying gaze of history. The challenge here is to take the signifying elements and revive them. Oehlen uses a historical sense of colour, in that he seems to be aware of the way colour was symbolised and deployed in purely abstract terms, in the paintings of the past, from which he takes formal identifications, stylistically it looks like a Dali here and there with some testicle like shapes, morphing forms inhabiting a twilight inner landscape . 'Piece' could be rotated for example and different tensions would arise, the yellow orb in bottom left could become a sun positioned in a traditional way, the yellow square to the right a window reflecting its rays. The set of significations here seems would ideally make you dizzy. In idea(logical) terms here there is 'nothing but confusion', this jouissance (a Lacanian french term which is a too real pleasure which enters into a tautology with enjoyment and becomes pain.), the symbolic texture trying to reign in this dangerous excess, to both use it and omit or keep it hidden is the symbolic discourse Ohelan is entering here. If these forms are re-symbolised, and a sense of form which suggests the past is nothing more than these moments where history is suspended not because anything changed but that the past itself was looked at in a

completely different way because of its symbolisation in the present. So the painting becomes historical in the Marxist sense in that it overturns the established narrative and 'performs a tiger's leap into the past' (Walter Benjamin p.333 1940) nothing actually changes on the face of the historical subject but the symbolic order is looked at in a different way. Like Van Goughs orchards or Duchamps urinal. This make what was familiar seem radically new and different, it opens up a new horizon for freedom. Oehlen in his use of 'bad techniques' is using both the established subject of Painting' and pointing to the inherent ontological gap in the act of painting itself to really reflect the transgression in painting itself, which is both tamed and released in this libidinal act of creation, and points to the real. To take our signification as it is given in the dominant forms is to given in to some ideal spectator en-framed by a dominant ideology. To create emancipatory potential in painting there needs to be a recognition of the break and gap inherent in the dominate symbolic order. The loss as reflected in 'objet petit a '. The point where no signification seems adequate and new forms constantly arise and are destroyed.

Chapter 3

Early renaissance painter Perro Del Fransico Flagellation of Christ (see image 2) presents a mysterious scene of ordered clean perspective and a split in the overall composition, formally this creates an unsettled feeling. The painting is divided into outside and inside. Inside Christ is being whipped before Governor Pilate, whilst outside 3 men seem totally oblivious, there eyes hold far away stares. It is as if the punishment of Christ which reverberates with man's original sin, has too much of a traumatic effect on these worldly, richly dressed men. The split in the composition of the painting could be read as the split in man. In that he is rejected for his original sin, but in so doing he also formally attempts to untie the split subjects relation to the world by externalising it. The vanishing point represents a perspective that creates a totality by creating a limit, a blot, from which springs symbolic totality, as such this unknowing point is structurally inherent. To create the totality you need a blot or transcendent point, the abject and the sublime, or the point of the subject in a discourse which affects the whole set of significations. Christ's face is smeared here through some accident, this creates a kind of 'puctum' (Hal Foster (Barthes) p1321998) or a point where the real intrudes. This holds around the idea of the original mark mark of language, which is the point where the loss of the subject begins, where he has what Lacan calls 'the glory of the mark' 'But the o, as such, is properly speaking what results from the fact that knowledge, at its

origin, can be reduced to signifying articulation. This knowledge is a means of enjoyment. And I repeat, when it works, what it produces is entropy. This entropy, this point of loss, is the only point, the only regular point by which we have access to what is involved in enjoyment.'
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan

Book XVII(1968)
I think this glory of the mark is the point of real and symbolic spring forth with indestructible desire. Christ here receives the glory of the mark as the son of the words creator. The point is a frozen point, the contrast between to precise cold mathematical precision of the composition and the raw symbolism create a tension, a window into this formal split at the point of objet a, his 3 foreground figures represent the mark tamed, Christ the word in all it otherness, which is the point of true love to love the abyss of the other and the mark of weakness.

Chapter 4

In the work of Fancis Bacon we get a sort of violence in the paint, through his figuration Bacon confronts those figure twisted by desire, sex and death. (see image 3)With his distorted flesh he approaches the 'objet

petit a' of Lacans theory. Slavjoi Zizek in his essay Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien : This is objet a: an entity that has no substantial consistency, which is in itself "nothing but confusion," and which acquires a definite shape only when looked upon from a standpoint distorted by the subject's desires and fears - as such, as a mere "shadow of what it is not," objet a is the strange object which is nothing but the inscription of the subject itself into the field of objects, in the guise of a stain which acquires form only when part of this field is anamorphically distorted by the subject's desire. Let us not forget that the most famous anamorphosis in the history of painting, that of Holbein's The Ambassadors, concerns death: when we look from the proper lateral standpoint at the anamorphically prolonged stain in the lower part of the painting, set amongst object's of human vanity, it reveals itself as the death skull ' (Zizek :2007) The ordinary abject body violently reshaped and reform through an unfathomable 'jouissance'. Sometimes Bacon's figures approach a formless primordial body or 'lamella' which can vaguely be translated as "manlet," a condensation of "man" and "omelet". (Zizek 2007) It is a leftover of the sexed subject that is an organ that does not exist and persist beyond life and death. In Fruedian terms it is the partial object, which is at the place of the libido, but it is a kind of leftover of the part of the sexed being, ingrated into symbolic reality and subject to what Freud called castration, it is a left over of the real, the obverse of Objet Petit a, an immortal undead death drive. (Zizek 2007). Bacons figures are brought down to bare essentials or what Bacon called 'Facts', if we take this on Lacanian terms the Lamella is what separates us from these facts, in its terrifying dimension of primordial void, these facts are outside the signifying chain so Bacons figures are framed by darkness by a proximity to this thing (Zizek 2007) But in relation to Bacon's painting it is perhaps interesting to look at awry, a see how the violence of bacons paint over the skin and and canvas serve as a violent poetry which positions itself above this void and if we were to take a Nietzschian track would support love also, this could be present, to follow Zizek's track of applying an undead imaginary image, in a vampire, but Bacons images rely instead of capturing and sucking in the gaze. Certainly there is, in Bacons figures a sense of abandonment, of a violence that was created with the 'word' and an attempt to objectify the gaze and of the true other, an unfathomable abyss who's desires I cannot truly know, and trap it. Bacons deploys a mythical, heroic stance, in the manner of the bullfight, to symbolise his confrontation with this real, which is thus in battle with the phallic spear of the matador.

Chapter 5
Micheal Bauer In many of Beaurs paintings we get a split between symbolic and abstract elements, the symbols seem to consist of half-conscious and half unconscious doodling and a language of expressive mark, with definite clear forms and signifiers that stitch the biomorphic and shattered forms together, in much the same way as a subjects split by language tries to bring this to terms with that of his pre- language mirror ideal as whole, essentially the only way to conceive this is through a libidinal economy. Bauers painting with its explicit symbolic rendering and the stained and hazy ground which these forms are inscribed bring to mind a kind of writing that is open to a whole signifying sequence, where the order is uncertain relies on pure formal qualities to generate real effects. It is in this surrealist tradition of exquisite corpse of a free association of forms that Beaur works This positions the work in the uncertain realm of objet petite a which language always fails to become a fixed signifier and is as such a representation of representation. We always have a distance towards reality and can never directly experience being as such, it always through the mediating chain of the signifying sequence, Bauer seems to depict variously abject forms amalgamated with hard edged patterning which is always somewhat skewed and imperfect, at times his forms bring to mind heraldry or the like, his forms are subversion of symbolic ideals bringing them face to face with the abject and reconstituting them or rather showing that the obscene is constitutive of those orders themselves and are their spectral support. Bauer asserts this abjectness with the dignity of of symbolic vitality. In Pol 1 ( Smart Etrus ) 2005 ) Bauer uses a bare canvas with some smudging, it is not clear if these are intentional or not, these bare stained canvases are an apt backdrop to the symbolic abjectivity of the faces he seems to be describing, he has been compared to the painter of Rudolph II of Prague Giuseppe Arcimboldo,

though he does use amalgamations they are amalgamations that have interruptions. In Pol 1 (smart estrus) (part of a series of heads/ body parts) there is a sense of the ridiculous and a number of ambiguous symbols, sexualised forms, the colour palette ranges from muddy colours to the bright red and stark black and white. The symbolic aspects cannot be overlooked . The nose of the head seems to protrude like a penis, indeed the whole head is covered in phallic protrusions. Though the sex of the head is ambiguous the eye is framed by long feminine lashes, but stains and smudges interrupt coherence symbolically. Bauer comes close to what Lacan called the symbolic real, the real as posited is positioned in Lacans discourse as in the central point in Borromean rings, it is the central point that unites the other realms, but the primordial fact here is pure difference, that is inherent in the 'one', a binary fact that is repressed and creates an externalised field representative of that first pure internal difference, that the one cannot coincide with itself creates difference itself. (Zizek 2004). This primordial difference creates a crack that expunges the subject itself turning the body into an object and outside the rigours of nature, an immortal partial object,that is at once inside and outside. Bauers rendering of a literal head space, the profiled face amalgamated around a central amorphic point where the forms merge. Beuar creates a kind of crucible zero level desire, the tumescence and de-tumescence of it using these phallic symbols and opposing them in the lower half of the painting with a kind feminine heraldry., this present a kind of 'face off' of the phallus and its castration by the symbolic order. Bauer is here is entering the threshold of our desires but once we step through at threshold we necessarily lose the shape and form of the space of our desire, so the painter at the point of this threshold should try to map the shape of his desire which is the way for him to attempt the heroic leap towards a freedom, or horizon of freedom that is more properly his 'own' and not some ossifying identification with a flawed 'big other' who in actuality does not exist.

Conclusion
Painting as an ontological exploration dwells within the realms of the symbolic and imaginary real, as an expression of truth it charges and distort those fields with desire, but the truth or real of it can only be achieved through engagement with the matter as an extension of the imaginary real of 'the thing' this the stain of subjectivity that the universal revolves around. A basic split and antagonism (Zizek 2004) that is the exception and the rule of subjectivity. The painters choices become a language that is both ontic and preontic. In the early Renaissance we have the full implementation of one point perspective which captures the gaze in closed loop, through the vanishing point, the artist screen (see Lacans diagram of The gaze image 6) of a privileged gaze : 'In order to conceive of the world as "ontologically closed" we imagine a "viewpoint" from which it appears as totality.1 Reality is always conceived from and for such a totalizing view, such an outside. As a result, reality per se is a product of an omniscient subjectivity we imagine ' (Brockelman 2007) This holds true also for Roman sculptures on viaducts , which have been created only for this gaze of the big other, and sculptures atop buildings . This gaze, is not the same as it is for the Romans but we still rely on the big other for the consistency of the symbolic space, we might fear that big brother is watching us but isn't the real nightmare that we are not being watched at all. (Zizek 2004 ) The primordial ontology is that we only exist insofar as we are watched, as objects in another's dream (Zizek 2004)

The real then is on the side of the imaginary, it is necessary for its construction and this is where the artist steps in, to question the space of this construction and to shake it up. The painter can open up a space for freedom in this place of the real imaginary. He throws himself into this empty space, which is filled and empty at the same time, the clash between the symbolic outside and the libidinal inside, the artist is at the threshold, he puts himself at stake, reveals and risks himself at the same time he enacts a anxious dance of hiding and revealing. In my painting which in terms of subject attempts to be neither abstract of figurative,
1

but rather in this threshold between to the two, a point of open signification. I like to enploy a sort of semi concious doodling at times to create a type of free association in the viewer of the painting. But rather this is a by-product starting out with no definite subject other than a formal distinction between outside and inside, my painting is trying to open up that space in-between. This can be an abject place but also a space for new freedom, but it is this space which generates anxiety. Simply because it point of contact, the touch, which perhaps reminds us of death, the shroud between me and the world. In post modern architecture we have these interstitial spaces, that both inside and outside, in term of painting and expression of signifying chain which makes up the space of your desire you are leaving yourself open. In a symbolic fashion it is displaying ones own guts on the wall. The artist smearing excreta (paint) to divert the object gaze of the real, the maternal mother gaze of the 'thing', waiting for you to shit.(Levine 2008 p90)

Bibliography and Images 2007,Slavoj Zizek (2007) Lacan.com Available from: http://www.lacan.com/zizhowto.html The Return of the Real: The Avante-Garde at the End of the Century Hal Foster (1996) [The MIT Press] 2007,Missing the Point: Reading the Lacanian Subject through Perspective - Thomas Brockelman (2007) Available from: http://lineofbeauty.org/index.php/s/article/view/10/47 2008,Lacan Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for the Arts (Contemporary Thinkers Reframed): A Guide for the Arts Student Steve Z. Levine (2008) [I.B.Tauris] 1995,The Emptiness of the Image: Psychoanalysis and Sexual Differences Parveen Adams Routledge; 1 edition (30 Nov 1995) 2004,Manufacturing Reality: Slavoj Zizek and the Reality of the Virtual - Director: Ben Wright

Walter Benjamin

On the Concept of History

The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII (1968) Jacques Lacan W W Norton & Co Inc, 2007
Slavoj iek - The Spectators Malevolent Neutrality (Lecture) available at:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QhRxhzVU7Y
2006, Neighbors and Other Monsters (in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology), Cambridge, Massachusetts: University of Chicago Press.

Image 1 : Albert Oehlen 'Piece'

2003 Oil on Canvas (280 x 340cm)

Image 2 : Flagellation of Christ Piero della Francesca

(probably 14551460) Oil and tempera on panel 58.4 cm 81.5 cm

Image 3: Francis Bacon Three Studies for a Crucifixion - 2 1962 Oil and sand on canvas; 198.1 x 144.8 cm (78 x 57 in); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

Image 4: Pol 1 ( Smart Etrus ) Michael Bauer 2005 oil on canvas 140 x 120 cm

Image 5: Virgin and Child with Saint Anne (Black chalk and touches of white chalk on brownish paper, mounted on canvas on tinted paper.) Leonardo da Vinci about 1499-1500 London, National Gallery

Image 6: Lacans daigrams of the gaze