TECHNICAL, MECHANICAL, IMITATION

I was slated in a crit four days ago and have since felt despondent and devoid of motivation. I was initially hit with a three-pronged spear: "The work is just technical, mechanical, imitation, that's the highest form you can take it to." "Where's the personalizing of the image?" followed shortly; after which I was swiftly body bagged by "they're just half-hearted attempts to take the image". Everyone must endure criticism for their work and I am no exception, this I have accepted. But my adversary seemed to adopt great airs as he did so, reveling in the entire tirade with sumptuous, sadistic delight.  
        My work is not brash, or brazen. It does not scandalize, nor offend. I like to think it has a quiet power, like those who lead lives of unremembered kindness, who are no less important for not being recognized, nor their attributes cheapened for not being glorified. I draw from the repertoire of images that I am immersed in, that we have created, fishing for moments of personal reverie amongst the collective. I draw these 'copies' because by drawing the image I can consume it anew- immerse myself in its contours, it's tonal scale, its mathematics. I scour its fragments, trace its every angle in order to replicate it, to know it, to possess it. I do not comply with the notion that because of this, the drawings cannot invite contemplation. That they are somehow lesser than 'proper' works of art. 

Below is the drawing I made after the crit, it was the promo image for a student photography exhibition flier. I think it may need more work, I'm not quite happy with it yet.

 


 

       

BOURGEOIS HAND

Transcription of Louise Bourgeois white marble hand sculpture- will find the work's actual title later.

LACK AND TRANSCENDENCE THEORY EXTRACT 2

 I have an analytical mind and often there are so many scattered ideas and disparate theoretical fragments all vying for attention that I find it difficult to organize. However, I'm hats not insisting that these thoughts are particularly profound! Recently a friend helped me draw connections from Lacan and the scopic drive to Jung and the collective unconscious. My frantic scrawl may be a bit ambiguous, but I'll try to clarify what he taught me:

          Jung outlines two levels of unconscious- the personal unconscious and the collective unconscious. Unconscious processes are not directly observable, but the products of the unconsciousness that cross the threshold of consciousness can be divided into two classes:
1. recognisable material, (of a personal origin) these are individual acquisitions or products of instinctive processes that make up the personality as a whole.
2. forgotten or repressed contents, which can come to the fore in a varying degree of intensity/ prominence at any time.
this makes up the PERSONAL UNCONSCIOUS, it is comprised of personal elements, and is therefore entirely relative. 
          The COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS however, is decribed by Jung as a 'lake' of archetypal images that cannot consciously be reached: "here resides contents of unknown origin that cannot be ascribed to individual acquisition, rather they are peculiar to mankind in general." The collective unconscious therefore has a history that has developed/ evolved over time “Our unconscious mind... is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past” (p.44) from which the whole of mankind partake. This is evidenced in the literary tropes and mythological motifs  consistently present in narratives across the world, such as 'The Original Sin', ''The Descent of Man', 'Katabasis' (Orpheus and Eurydice) and 'Nekyia'. In fact, the motif of Nekyia is found everywhere in antiquity and practically all over the world. “It expresses the psychological mechanism of introversion of the conscious mind into deeper layers of unconscious psyche.” (p.41)
           Universal lack could then stem from the 'lake', or rather the yearning to comprehend its magnitude despite never being able to abandon consciousness fully enough for this to happen. Wanting to examine 'triggers' that might hint at connections to the 'lake', Jung experimented with word association, but we can extend his findings out to include visual stimuli. Each trigger was said to bring about a moment of revelation, a kind of 'einfall' (a German word with no real English equivalent, which means a thing which falls into your head from nowhere). Resonating triggers would attest to a "complex, a conglomeration of psychic contents characterised by a peculiar or perhaps painful feeling-tone, something that is usually hidden from sight. It is as though a projectile struck through the thick layer of the persona into the dark layer." (p.53)
       So when an image punctures or wounds you, it is because the instinctive emotional reaction affects and invades you. Emotions Jung ascertained, were stronger than the ego-complex, they could only be controlled by suppression or severe force; hence "the energy/ intensity of the ego-complex which manifests itself in will power gradually decreases as you approach the darkness of the unconscious." (p.48) But then does this disregard the subjectivity of our object/ image choices? We do not all find affinity with the same 'triggers'.

All information gleaned from 'C.G. JUNG, ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY ITS THEORY AND PRACTICE' printed in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd. in 1968

AFTER MANZONI

I stumbled across this work by Piero Manzoni whilst working at the library. It was featured in an issue of 'A' magazine. I was on a shift so, desperate not to lose the page, I tore off a piece of black sugar paper and imbedded it between the leaves of the journal. When I could finally get round to photocopying it, the black paper became dislodged, obscuring Manzoni's image. Through sheer fluke I had created my own void, making the resulting print ironically apt. In my drawing the black shape appears to hover, as if raised on a higher plane than Manzoni's panels, but this is exactly how it appeared in the original print. I started to wonder if this is effectively what we all do when viewing an image or an object that arrests us. Do we project our voids onto unsuspecting objects in the external, or do these objects really evoke and attest to something internal? Like catalysts, do these 'triggers' partially illuminate that undecipherable zone in the recesses of our being?     

FROM 'PONTE'

Transcription of boy taken from 'Ponte' 2012- photograph by Mikhael Subotzky and Patrick Waterhouse. There's something about the eyes of the figure, disturbingly direct yet vacuous. I don't know if I've captured how haunting his gaze is in my drawing but check out the original: http://liverpoolbiennial.co.uk/artists/all/326/mikhael-subotzky-and-patrick-waterhouse/ to see what I was trying to get at. 

LACK AND TRANSCENDENCE THEORY EXTRACT 1

Notes from my research around the concepts of lack and transcendence:

In Freudian terms there is no desire without lack, our scopic drive is organized around desire and possession. Images that ‘puncture’ or ‘wound’ seemingly attest to this unrealized ‘lack’, offering a promise of greater proximity with an ‘essential truth’ that might compensate for an internal ‘void’. Hence we identify with the image, searching for the lost loved object in effigy. 
         Lacan described endeavors to fill the subconscious void (both in the production and consumption of artworks) as the true meaning of sublimation. He referred to this void (or ‘the Thing’ as he coined it) as a ‘non-place’ of deprivation, both ‘suffocatingly‘ insistent and yet “unbearably absent” and inaccessible. Searching for compensation in visual imagery, Lacan argued, is futile because ‘the Thing’ eludes signification- it is beyond our capacity as humans to represent. Artworks that transfix or puncture, according to these principles do so because they involve an object choice that attests to the individual’s own construction of self. The individual’s own personal void.