Readymade, Found Object, Photograph Author(s): Margaret Iversen Source: Art Journal, Vol. 63, No.

2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 44-57 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4134520 . Accessed: 14/08/2011 04:08
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

College Art Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Art Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

The 1936 Surrealist of Exhibition Objects brought together a bewildering range of items including natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natura objects, found objects, perturbed objects, readymade objects, American objects, Oceanic objects, mathematical objects, and Surrealist objects.' Of the nonethnographic types listed, only the readymade and the found object still retain any currency, and the readymade can no longer be subsumed under the Surrealist umbrella. Marcel Duchamp's readymade and Andre Breton's found object have such different legacies that they now arguably constitute a categorical distinction. This was not so clear in the mid- 1930os when Breton could define readymades as "manufactured objects raised to the dignity of works of art through the choice of the artist." 2Yet, even now, the terms are still often run together and used interchangeably.What I want to do in this paper is to drive a wedge between them. We will find that their distinctiveness hinges on the kind of subjective relation each assumes. They turn out to embody different aspects of the most influential account of what might be called the subjective dimension of our relation to art-Immanuel Kant's conception of the aesthetic. By setting the readymade and the found object in relation to aesthetic theory, I aim to cut across the current tendency on the part of some critics to invoke a vague conception of the beautiful in order to call into question postconceptual or postmodern trends in the arts and criticism. The aesthetic, I intend to show, is not exhausted Margaret Iversen by the concept of beauty.3Yet, at the same time, I want to question the wisdom of these critics' opponents who reaffirm the anti-aesthetic and denigrate the Kantian tradition.4 What the strident debates pro- and antibeauty overlook is the continuity of certain aesthetic attitudes and ideas that stretch from Kant through the and reemerge in contemporary art practices. Drawing out this early avant-gardes continuity is not done in the spirit of a nostalgic return to notions of beauty, but rather as a way of deepening our understanding of contemporary practice and theory. Owing to the work of influential artists such as Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha, the readymade's legacy has been largely photographic. In the latter part of this paper, I take up the less familiar theme of the found object's photographic legacy, focusing on the work of Mary Kelly and Gabriel Orozco.

Readymade, Found Object, Photograph

I would like to thank Dawn Ades, Diarmuid Costello, Briony Fer, Neil Cox, Stephen Melville, and James Meyer for their thoughts and encouragement. I. Expositionsurr6alisted'objets, Galerie Ratton, Paris, May, 1936. Andr6 Breton's account of the exhibition in "Crisisof the Object" has a slightly different set of categories. American and Oceanic objects are included under the heading of Primitive and his list includes mobile objects. See trans. S. W. Taylor Breton, Surrealism and Painting, (London: MacDonald, 1972), 275-80. 2. Andr6 Breton, "Lighthouseof the Bride" and 88. (1935), in Surrealism Painting, 3. If recent debates have centered on the concept of beauty, duringthe 1980s that other form of aesthetic judgment, the sublime, was often invoked. See particularly Jean-FrancoisLyotard, The Post-Modern Condition: Reporton Knowledge A (1979; Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986) and "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde," 22, Artforum no. 8 (April 1984): 36-43. 4. See Alex Alberro's article in this issue for a fairly comprehensive bibliographyof the debate.

The Beautiful
Every object implies a certain kind of subject. Psychoanalysis is, of course, dedicated to uncovering this kind of relation. The fetish object, for example, implies a subject that is split along the lines of acknowledgement and denial of castration. The glossy perfection of objects in fashion magazines, for another example, implies a narcissistic subject who fears and defends against the ravages of the body in pieces. Or again, the immaculate new kitchen as object implies a subject trying to keep a lid on a repressed desire for glorious muck; the kitchen is what's called a "reaction formation." You will notice that in each of these cases, the object does not, so to speak, "match" the subject; rather, there is an inverted relationship, since the object is supposed to compensate somehow for a subjective sense of deficiency.

45 art journal

Gabriel Orozco. WaitingChairs, 1998. Cibachrome. 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm). Edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, NewYork.

44 SUMMER 2004

5. Immanuel trans. Kant, of Critique Judgment, WernerS. Pluhar Hackett,1987), (Indianapolis: 245. Forintroductory accountsof thisbook, see and Podro,"Kant the AestheticImaginaMichael ed. tion,"inArtandThought, D. ArnoldandM. Iversen Blackwells, (Oxford: 2003), 51-70, and EvaSchaper, and The "Taste, Sublimity Genius: Aesthetics NatureandArt,"in TheCambridge of to ed. Companion Kant, Paul Guyer(Cambridge: Press,1992).Forgood fullCambridge University lengthstudiessee HenryE.Allison, Theory Kant's A of of Taste: Reading theCritique Aesthetic of Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2001), andPaul and Guyer, Kant theClaims Press, of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University 1979). Dantois critical Kant's 6. Arthur of universalism in "From Aesthetics Art Criticism," the to After Endof Art: Art of Contemporary andthe Paole Princeton Press, History (Princeton: University de 1997),94. Thierry Duve,on the other hand, to as picksout the claim universality the most featureof the judgment. is for hima It important with signof hope thatwe canshareourfeelings others.See Kant afterDuchamp (Cambridge, MIT Mass.: Press,1996). 7. Arthur The as and Schopenhauer, World Will vol. Representation I,trans.E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover, 1969), 197.

And what about the beautiful? What kind of subject is implied by the object of aesthetic judgment? One of the most important defining features of aesthetic of is judgment, according to Kant in TheCritique Judgment, its "disinterestedness." There are different types of interest, for example, ethical, instrumental, and appetitive. The first two of these answer a rational demand; the last stipulates that the judgment cannot be determined by something that satisfies a desire or lack. Psychoanalytic categories, then, would seem to be of little relevance in this case. It seems as though the judgment is made by some part of the self unlike what we normally think of as subjectivity.Yet, neither can the judgment be objective, in the sense of rational or cognitive. This is because the object of aesthetic judgment is one that eludes conceptual definition and cognitive clarity. It is the focus of an opaque, if suggestive, sensory experience. And it is this opacity that stimulates the free play of imagination and understanding. In concert, these two faculties search for and find analogies, associations, formal rhymes and rhythms. This activity is pleasurable in itself because it satisfies the mind's demand for coherence, but without subsuming the sensuous particular under any definite concept and so bringing the activity to an end. This is why the judgment is said to be reflective rather than determinate; it relates to the sensory and mental activity occasioned by the object. Both our ordering, rational capacity and our receptivity to sensuous impressions are engaged. This activity helps both to heal the divisions between our various faculties and, briefly, to overcome the mind's estrangement from the world.5 Is there anything to be salvaged from this account of the beautiful? Or is it hopelessly conciliatory and mired in a particularWestern, male, bourgeois individuality, whose disinterested attitude is just the assumption of the position of the subject in general entitled to legislate for all?6There are two features of this account that I want to draw out and examine in the light of contemporary art practices and critical discourses. One is the issue of disinterestedness; the other is the object's cognitive opacity. Kant offered very few examples of the kind of experience he was describbut both Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer coning, nected the disinterested aesthetic attitude with Dutch art. Schopenhauer's stress on the dominance of the will in our everyday lives meant that he particularly admired Netherlandish depictions of the everyday,undistorted by appetite or desire. Seventeenth-century Dutch still-life and genre painting, he argued, show an objective, that is, disinterested, view of the most insignificant things. "The aesthetic beholder does not contemplate this without emotion, for it graphically describes to him the calm, tranquil, will-free frame of mind which was necessary for contemplating such insignificant things so objectively, considering them so attentively, and repeating this attention with such thought."7 What is being described here is an art practice that tries to circumvent selfish desire, power, mastery, possessiveness-the whole complex of relations that normally governs our lives. The accomplishment of this is called disinterestedness. A later, Symbolist critical discourse would reinvent this aesthetic attitude by calling for a kind of poetry that avoided all personal obtrusion. In this case, disinterestedness is invoked in favor of an extrapersonal and intrinsically poetic domain of language. Stephane Mallarme, for example, wrote an appreciative account of Edouard Manet, praising the way his hand became "an impersonal

46

SUMMER

2004

abstraction.... The artist's personal feeling, his particular tastes are, for the time being, absorbed, ignored." Manet was determined to paint "entirely without himself." Searching for a way to accomplish this feat, Manet looked to the Dutch and Flemish artists and to an artist who had absorbed their lessons, Diego Velazquez.8 In the early 197os, Michael Fried invoked Mallarm6's essay to characterize the impersonal work of Morris Louis and his apparent "elocutionary disappearance."Jackson Pollock, on the other hand, is seen as locked in a struggle between "the specificity of urgent personal feeling and the impersonal, and in that sense abstract, demands of painting itself."9 Mallarme is also the key figure in Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" (1968): "In France, Mallarm6i was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author."'o Photography's "objective" vision of the world was also celebrated in these terms; mechanization was understood as a way of cutting through the carapace of our habitual, interest-laden perceptions. Salvador Dali, for instance, praised "the anaesthetic stare of the extremely clear eye-the lashless eye of Zeiss."" And if the mechanically reproduced image can be understood as "disinterested," so also might the factory-made, mass-produced object-provided that it is denatured so as to neutralize its status as a commodity intended to satisfy desire. The celebrated autonomy of the work of art, it turns out, implies the obliteration of the poet or painter in his or her medium. It is fundamentally about the displacement of one's own agency so that something other can surface.The aim is to cut through stereotype and sentiment so as to discover what Mallarmeicalled "a strange new beauty."'2
8. St6phane Mallarm6,"The Impressionists and idouard Manet" (1876), repr. in Penny Florence,

and Visual Aural and Mallorm6, Monet, Redon: and of Signs theGeneration Meaning (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 12. 9. Michael Fried, "MorrisLouis"(1971), in Art

Readymade
Characteristically,Duchamp pushed the logic of disinterestedness to such an extreme that it bites its own tail. Arthur Danto has made this connection, noting that "Duchamp's anti-aesthetic carries with it an implicit anti-subjectivity which ') is to be found at the very heart of Kantian aesthetics." The readymade can be ad seen as a limit case of the aesthetic-its near reductio absurdum-which forces us to reflect on the relation of art to the commodity, of the aesthetic to the appetitive. Its effect, its legacy for subsequent art was to shift the artistic "discursive field" away from questions about aesthetic experience and toward questions of what constitutes a work of art.'4The readymade is a limit case that throws into sharp relief our deeply embedded expectations of a work of art. Need it involve craft? Is the signature of the artist or the work's location in a gallery sufficient to single out an object as art?Are aesthetic qualities necessary? Does a replica have the same value as the original work? Or does this distinction collapse in the face of the readymade?This reductive strategy puts pressure on our expectations of the artist's activity by erasing every trace of personal taste or expressive gesture. To accomplish this, certain processes are put in train to determine the form is or "choice" of the object. Duchamp's rendez-vousexactly this-a prearranged appointment (time, day, place, to be inscribed on the object that turns up for the rendezvous). This strategy is compared by Duchamp to a "snapshot effect." is Although much theory and practice after Duchamp has been aggressively

andObjecthood: and and Essays Reviews (Chicago

London: Chicago University Press, 1998), 127. 10. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author," in Image/Music/Text,trans. Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977). The article was first published in Englishin Aspen Magazine 5/6 (1966), n.p. I I. Zeiss is the name of a German camera manufacturer,famous for the quality if its lenses. Salvador Dali, "Photography: Pure Creation

in of the Mind," Salvador TheEarly Years Doli:

(London: South BankCentre, 1994), 216. 12. Mallarme, 17. 13. Danto, Afterthe End of Art, 90. 14. This is essentially what Thierry de Duve argues in Kantafter Duchamp.The question is no or longer, "Is it beautiful?" even "Is it a painting?" but rather "Is it art?"De Duve follows a number of Anglo-American reflections on the aesthetic in light of the readymade, includingthe writings of George Dickie, Arthur Danto, and Richard Wollheim. 15. See "Specificationfor 'Readymades"' in The

Essential ed. of Writings Marcel Duchamp, M.

Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 32.

47 art journal

anti-aesthetic, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Duchamp understood his own work within the tradition of disinterested art. It is well known that he distanced himself from the anti-art antics of Dada and TristanTzara, taking up an aloof position outside the art/anti-art debate. In "The CreativeAct," Duchamp approvingly cited T. S. Eliot: "The more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the man who creates.""9 When his early interest in mechanical drawing, he remarked, "It was a sort discussing of loophole. You know, I've always felt the need to escape myself."'7The visual indifference of mechanical drawing and the readymade was, for him, a way of escaping the weight of taste, defined as "a repetition of something already accepted." The habitual, the tasteful, the accepted were the deadly readymades that governed most art; Duchamp's readymades were governed by the zero degree of aesthetics and aimed at a strange new beauty.'" The legacy of the Duchampian "disinterested" attitude can be seen in Minimalist, Pop, and Conceptual art.The so-called Duchamp effect on the art
of the later 196os and 1970s is now clear.'9 The elocutionary disappearance of

16. Ibid.,138. with 17. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues Marcel trans.RonPadgett Da Duchamp, (New York: Capo Press,1987),31. and Joselit arguesthatDuchamp his 18. David themselves followers"found readymade ... in caught endlesseconomyor reproduction." I wouldaddthatthey endeavored break the to mold.SeeJoselit,Infinite Marcel Regress: Duchamp, 1910-1941 (Cambridge, Mass.: Press,1998), MIT 197. 19.See, for instance, Duchamp The ed. Effect, Martha Buskirk Mignon and Nixon(Cambridge, Mass.: Press,1996),andThierry Duve, MIT de du entreavantResonances Readymade: Duchamp gardeet tradition (Nimes:Editions Jacqueline Chambon,1989).Foran accountof the variety of Duchamp effects,see DavidHopkins, After Art, Modern 1945-2000 (Oxford: Oxford Press,2000). University 20. MelBochner, "Serial System: Art, Solipsism," Arts 42. 41, Magazine no. 8 (Summer 1967): See also RobertMorris, "SomeNotes on the The of for Phenomenology Painting: Search the Altered Motivated" (1970),in Continuous Project Mass.: Press,1993), MIT Daily (Cambridge, 71-94. "That Thing ...," Old 21. Roland Barthes, Art in TheResponsibilityForms: Critical of on Essays Hill Music, andRepresentation York: Art, (New andWang,1985),200. Barthes's insistence on the asymmetry the relation betweenthe artist/ of authorandthe rebornviewer/readeris not sharedby allcommentators see the artist's who reticencemirrored an equally in desubjectivized responseto the work.

the artist is witnessed, for example, in Mel Bochner's description of the way a logical system "excludes individual personality as much as possible," or in Robert Morris's practice of letting the materials determine form.2" In an article about Pop called "That Old Thing Art .. .," Barthes reprised the argument of "The Death of the Author," noting that "the Pop artist doesn't stand behind the work, and he himself has no depth." He rightly concludes that what is presented is "another conception of the human subject."2'While no direct line can be drawn between Kant'sdisinterestedness and Duchamp's aesthetic of indifference, my argument nonetheless indicates that the so-called anti-aesthetic tradition in twentieth-century art is, in fact, a development of one of the defining features of the aesthetic itself, one that became a strategy for short-circuiting the imposition of subjectivity.

Found Object
One can easily see how Kant'scharacterization of aesthetic judgment as disinterested could lead to the various desubjectivizing artistic practices I've mentioned. But if one stresses another aspect of Kant's aesthetic, the initial perplexity and prelogical play in relation to the object that eludes our full understanding, one can also readily see how the aesthetic, modified through Freud, might survive in some form in Surrealist art and writing. I want to draw out this continuity in relation to Breton's conception of the found object. The found object shares with the readymade a lack of obvious aesthetic quality and little intervention on the part of the artist beyond putting the object in circulation, but in almost every other respect it is dissimilar. The difference is attributable to Breton's positioning the found object in a different space-the space of the unconscious. In "SurrealistSituation of the Object" (1935), Breton called on both poets and painters to incorporate in their work the "precision of sensible forms." He described a situation in which photography had taken over the mimetic function of representation, so that Surrealist painting was forced to retreat to the domain of inner perception. This would not mean, however, that painting would detach itself from external reality.As Breton said, there is no such thing as "spontaneous

48

SUMMER

2004

22. Andr6 Breton, "SurrealistSituation of the Object" (1935), in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, 1972), 272. 23. Steven Harris, "The Chain of Glass: RethinkingBreton's Concept of Objective Chance," Collapse4 (May 1999): 60. 24. Andr6 Breton, Mad Love,trans. MaryAnn Caws (Lincoln:University of Nebraska Press, 1987), 25. 25. Jacques Lacan, The FourFundamental Concepts ed. of Psycho-Analysis, Jacques-Alain Miller,trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1977). Translationof Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse,livre XI (Editions du seuil, 1973). This is the published version of Lacan's Seminar XI, delivered in 1964. Sigmund Freud, Beyondthe PleasurePrinciple (1920), Standard Editionof the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 18, 3-66. 26. Breton, Mad Love, 13. 27. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MITPress, 1993). 28. Breton, Mad Love,33.

generation" in mental reality. Rather, Surrealist images and objects are like the "visual residues" from past experience that turn up in dreams." Freudian theory enabled Breton to overcome the gap between internal and external domains, because, as Steven Harris nicely puts it, it "mediated relations between external nature, perception and the unconscious.23 Like Kant, Breton saw art as a means of overcoming the breach between mind and world. For Kant, it was the beautiful object's formal purposiveness that gestured toward the idea of a "prearranged"harmonious relation of mind to its objects. For the modern materialist Breton, however, the relation is established by external reality's effects on the psyche: "Chance would be the form taken by external reality as it traces a path (se fraie chemin) the human unconscious."24 un in The object found as if by chance is situated at the point of connection between external nature, perception, and the unconscious, and thus has a peculiar, elusive relation to vision. The space occupied by the found object is carved out by traumatic experience, defined precisely as an experience that has failed to achieve a representation, but on which, nonetheless, one's whole existence depends. I will argue that this object calls attention to itself by creating a hole in the fabric of normal perception. This may sound as though I'm contrasting the found object with the readymade in terms of a subjectivity/antisubjectivity polarity, but the matter is not so simple. The traumatic subject is not the personal self that was so strenuously avoided in the tradition of disinterested art. Boththat tradition and Surrealism were interested in the displacement of the artist's agency. What kind of subject is implied by the found object? I would suggest a Lacanian one. Reading Breton's MadLove (1937) and Jacques Lacan's 1964 seminar, TheFour Fundamental of in Concepts Psycho-Analysis, tandem one can see how they both circle around Freud's Beyond Pleasure the and, also, how deeply influenced Principle Lacan was by Breton's notion of the objet trouve trouvaille or (found object)."2 Breton described the trouvaille a solution found not by logical means, and one that as differs completely from what is anticipated. "In any case, what is delightful here is the dissimilarity itself which exists between the object wished for and the Hal object found."''26In his book Compulsive Beauty, Foster has analyzed in some detail the passages in MadLove about the two key trouvailles-awooden spoon and a metal mask; he demonstrates clearly that they do not represent simple wish fulfillments, but are laced with desire and death. He suggests that Breton's conception of the found object anticipates Lacan'sobjet a-the lost object which petit sets desire in motion and which, paradoxically, represents both a hole in the integrity of our world and the thing that comes to hide the hole.27 I think, however, that Lacan'selusive object is actually modeled on Breton's found object. The example of the marvelous slipper-spoon is most telling. Breton wanted Alberto Giacometti to make him a literal, material instantiation of the but perplexing phrase Cinderella-ashtray (Cendrillon-cendrier), it was not forthcoming. On a visit to a Paris flea market with the sculptor, Breton lit on a curious wooden spoon with a little boot carved under its handle and carried it off. Only when he got the object home did it transform itself into the object of his desire: "It was clearly changing right under my eyes. From the side, at a certain height, the little wood spoon coming out of its handle, took on, with the help of the curvature of the handle, the aspect of a heel and the whole object presented the silhouette of a slipper on tiptoe like those of dancers."28

49 art journal

Man Ray."From a little shoe that was part of it S1934. Black-and-white photograph published in Andr6 Breton, Mad Love. @ 2004 Man RayTrust/ ADAGP, Paris, and DACS, London.

29. Ibid., 36. 30. Lacan, The FourFundamentalConcepts, 184. 3 1. Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses,Seminar Book III,1955-56, ed. Jacques-AlainMiller(New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 179. 32. Malcolm Bowie, Lacan(London: Fontana, 1991), 168. 33. Roland Barthes, CameraLucida:Reflectionson Photography (1980), trans. RichardHoward (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 87. See my "What Is a Photograph?"in Art History 17, no. 3 (September 1994): 450-63.

Like the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein's painting The which Ambassadors, resolves into a skull "from the side, at a certain height," the opaque, incomprehensible spoon is suddenly transformed into the lustrous lost object par excellence, Cinderella's glass slipper. "It is just what, in our folklore, takes on the meaning of the lostobject.'"29the reflection in the mirror is the prototype of all images of the If ego, then this contradictory, ungraspable, fleeting object is the prototype for images of the castrated, barred, split, in short, anamorphic subject. This subject, called punningly by Lacanle sujet troue (the subject full of holes), uses an objet trouve found (a object) to figure both the hole and the bit that's missing.30 The slippery spoon of love has its counterpart, the mask of death, found by Giacometti on the same occasion and which, according to Breton, enabled him to finish his sculpture L'Objet invisible. as I argue, Lacan formulated his idea of the object of desire with Breton's If, in trouvaille mind, then he must also have borrowed the Surrealist notion of the encounter for his conception of la rencontre manqu&e (missed or failed encounter). In effect, Lacan recast Freud's conception of trauma in terms of the Surrealist encounter. The found object is encountered and the effect is traumatic.The contrast between the Duchampian rendezvous and the Bretonian encounter should now be clear.While the readymade is essentially indifferent, multiple, and mass-produced, the found object is essentially singular or irreplaceable, and both lost and found. Throughout his career, Lacan insisted that there was something about the subject not captured in the articulations of language or in a series of imaginary captivations. The allusions in his early writings to personality and to the style of the subject attest to this, as does the following remark from Seminar III, The "There is, in effect, something radically unassimilable to the signifier. Psychoses: It's quite simply the subject's singular existence."3' The mark of the subject's singularity is objet petita.Yet, since objet a cannot become an object of consciouspetit ness and is unspecularizable, it is not susceptible to the criticism that it revives a nostalgia for lost immediacy or presence. Treading carefully, Malcolm Bowie remarks that, with the introduction of objet petita, Lacan allowed "the ghost of to regain admission to his scheme."32 referentiality A ghost of referentialiy is exactly what Barthes invoked in his Camera Lucida, where he stressed the greater importance for photography of chemistry rather than the camera obscura: it is light-sensitive paper that gives the photograph its essential nature as a "that-has-been." Barthes emphasized the photograph's intimate connection with the object, attesting to the reality of the thing-but a reality in a past state, an ectoplasm, a reality one can no longer touch. As I have argued elsewhere, Barthes formulated his idea of the subject's relation to photogFundamental 33He argued, raphy with one hand in the pages of Lacan'sFour Concepts. for instance, that the defining characteristic of photography is its attachment to

50

SUMMER

2004

"the absolute Particular,the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid, the This ... in short, what Lacan calls Tuche, Occasion, the Encounter, the the Real, in its indefatigable expression."34 Tuch' experienced by the subject as a is as a trauma-an encounter with a real beyond the pleasure painful intrusion, the Lucida, real is located in a detail, a punctum, principle. In the first part of Camera also called by him "petite tache" (little mark or stain) -a reference to Lacan'sblind spot in the orthodox perceptual field also called the stain and defined as "that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness. 35For Barthes, photography, like the found object, has a privileged relation to this blind spot, this hole, this traumatic real. If this is so, then photography is a fascinatingly ambivalent medium: not only readymade/simulacral, but also traumatic/real.

Mary Kelly
I now want to focus my discussions of the found object, photography, and aesthetics beyond the pleasure principle on the work of two contemporary artists. One artist whose work has always been a touchstone for my thinking is Mary Kelly.In a recent interview, Kelly spoke about how she regarded her installation Post-Partum Document polemically as related to the work of British Conceptual artists, whose interrogation of the object was not followed up by an interrogation of the subject.36The Introductionto Document, 1973, takes the form of tiny baby vests crossed, indeed, crossed out, by the lines of Lacan'sdiagram of intersubjectivity. Although the vests are readymade and arranged serially, their psychic value and relation to loss is obvious, making them more akin to found Part have the same significance. In objects. The panels of Corpus, I of Interim, middle age is conceived as a moment of loss in relation to one's sense of Interim, identity as a woman. The posed articles of clothing refer to the neuropathologist Jean Martin Charcot's famous photographs of hysterics, of great importance in Surrealist circles, but formally they resemble the photograph in Breton's Nadja of a bronze paperweight in the form of a woman's glove. This isolated article of However, the Surrealist clothing served as a model of the image panels for Corpus. images that relate formally most closely to the Corpus panels are Brassai'sstrange of Sculptures involontaires.37 involuntary sculptures were These close-up photographs photographed on glass and subjected to a raking light so that they seem to hover just above the ground, casting a shadow. Kelly produced a similar effect by using semitransparent laminated photo positives applied to Perspex panels so as to emphasize these objects' peculiar relation to visibility.38 Kelly gives us a clue about what she found valuable in these Surrealist

Mary Kelly.Post-Partum Document, Introduction, 1973. Detail. Perspex units, white card, wool vests, pencil, and ink. Four units, ea. 8 x I0 in. (20 x 25.5 cm). Collection of Eileen and Peter Norton. Courtesy of the artist.

34. Ibid.,4. 35. Ibid., 75. 36. Mary Kelly,"Excavating Post-Partum Document,"interview with JuliCarson, in Mary Kelly:RereadingPost-Partum Document (Vienna: Generali Foundation, 1998), 186. 37. Minotaure3/4 (December 1933): 68 the 38. See my "Visualizing Unconscious: Mary Kelly'sInstallations,"in Mary Kelly(London: Phaidon, 1997), 32-85.

51 art journal

E AAENAC

A4IENACE

52

SUMMER

2004

Brassai. Sculpture involontaire, billet d'autobus roul6, 1932. Black-and-white photograph. @ Estate Brassai, R.M.N.

Anonymous. Photograph of bronze glove belonging to a woman, 1928. Published with caption "Gant de femme aussi ... " in Andr6 Breton, Nadja, 65.

opposite: Mary Kelly. Interim, Part I: Corpus, 1984-85. Laminated photo positive, silkscreen, and acrylic on Plexiglas.Thirty panels, ea. 35 x 48 in. (90 x 122.5 cm). Courtesy of Postmasters Gallery, NewYork. Courtesy of the artist.

Gant de femme aussi...(p. 65).

53

art journal

precedents when she contrasts the function of perspective construction with another kind of picture found in "the realm of lost objects," a realm where "vanishing points are determined, not by geometry, but by what is real for the subject, points linked, not to a surface, but to a place-the unconscious-and not by means of light, but by the laws of primary process."39These filmy items of clothing are adrift in the realm of lost objects, cut off from symbolically articulated reality.This is consistent with Breton's call for artists to use real objects in their work. While he encouraged poets and painters to incorporate the "precision of sensible forms," he also required that these objects be detached from the domain of perception-consciousness, making them like the "visual residues" that turn up in dreams.40Carefully choosing her materials and formal devices, Kelly positions her objects in an ambiguous space between external nature, perception, and the unconscious.

Gabriel Orozco
There is a wonderful catalogue of an exhibition of Gabriel Orozco's work held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1999.4' Reproduced in the volume, called are Box, Photogravity, fragments of pages of the artist's notebooks. All very Green you and Duchamp is undoubtedly an important figure for Orozco.42But may say, some of his work and notes point in another direction. A fragmentary note reads: "Photography as a hole."43Elsewhere in the notes, one can find jottings that help to explicate this puzzling phrase. It would seem to have some relation to his idea of the "expectant (or waiting) object."44This object is the inverse of sculpture, which traditionally has its center of gravity in its base. What would happen, Orozco asks, if sculpture were opened up and we moved inside it? Then the relation would be inverted; the spectator would become the object of sight, the vanishing point.,4 This idea is reminiscent of Lacan'sinverted perspective But Fundamental of diagram in TheFour Concepts Psycho-Analysis. Orozco had to accomplish this inversion in space, in material form. On the same page is a sketch for just such a projected nonsculpture. A slice of clay is removed from the base of a traditionally conceived sculpture. The sculpture is thrown away and the slice of clay spread out on the ground and flipped over so we can see the imprint of this opened-out, obliterated vanishing point. We are not far from CarlAndre's floor pieces and his gnomic remark "A thing is a hole in a thing it is not," which points toward an idea of sculpture as a rupture in the continuum of space.46For the most part, Orozco's notes aren't dated, but we can be pretty sure this is a first stab at what was to become Yielding Stone,1992, a ball of plasticine that has been rolled through the street, picking up marks and debris. Black Kites (i997) also seems to play on a collapse of Renaissance perspective, whose very emblem is the checkerboard-tiled pavement, now anamorphically stretched and distorted around a death's head. If my allusion to Lacan in the context of Orozco's work seems farfetched, there is another page in the notebook where Orozco has jotted down a quotation from Slavoj Zizek's Looking Zizek is largely responsible Awry.47 for the mediation to a wider audience of Lacan'slater work, where he developed the idea of the real as a register of the psychic reality set in relation to the imaginary and the symbolic. The Zizek citation follows remarks on Kazimir Malevich's
BlackSquare (1915).

39. Mary Desire," Kelly, "Desiring Images/Imaging inImaging Desire Mass.: Press, MIT (Cambridge 1996), 122. 40. Breton,"Surrealist Situation the Object," of 272. 41. Gabriel Orozco,Photogravity (Philadelphia: Museum Art, 1999). of Philadelphia 42. David Orozco'sworkas Joselitdescribes an withthe readymade, blurinvolving encounter I ringthe distinctionwishto preservebetween rendezvous encounter. and "Gabriel Orozco," 39, Artforum no. I (September 2000): 173. 43. Orozco,54. 44. Ibid., 8. 45. Ibid.,II. 46. Interview CarlAndre.See LucyLippard, with SixYears: Demoaterialization from1966 The of Art to 1972 (Berkeley: of Press, University California 1997),40. See alsoAlex Potts,TheSculptural Modernist, Minimalist Imagination: Figurative, (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press,2000), 312ff. 47. Orozco,36.

54

SUMMER

2004

Gabriel Orozco. Yielding Stone, 1992. Plasticine and dust. 19 in. diam. (48.5 cm), 132.2 Ibs (60 kg). Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, NewYork.

The "reality" (white background surface, the "liberated nothingness," the open space in which nothingness can appear) obtains its consistency only by means of the "black hole" in its center, (the Lacanian dasDing,the Thing that gives body to the substance of enjoyment) i.e., by the exclusion of the Real, by the change of the status of the Real into that of a central lack.48 If Kelly shows us the object's proximity to that central lack, then Orozco wants to show us the unrepresentable threshold itself: the next-to-nothing, the ripple in water, "the wake of an action," as he puts it. In short, "photography as a hole." See, for example, Orozco's photograph of a found Zen drawing done with rain water for ink and bicycle wheels for a brush, Extension Reflection, of 1992. His Breath Piano,I993, shows a smoky patch of condensation on the cool black suron face of the piano. The Waiting These Chairs,1998, are expectant objects, parexcellence. on the threshold of visibility or invoke an absence or photographs present objects past moment in time. In this way, Orozco heightens photography's that-has-been

48. Slavoj Zizek, Looking An to Awry: Introduction Jacques LacanthroughPopularCulture(Cambridge, Mass., and London: Verso, 1991), 19.

55

art journal

56

SUMMER

2004

Gabriel Orozco. Extension of Reflection, 1992. C-print. 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm). Edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, NewYork. Gabriel Orozco. Breath on Piano, 1993. C-print. 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 cm). Edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, NewYork.

character,but also generalizes it to include the whole texture of our experience of the world, punctuated as it is with holes leading down to the unconscious. We saw that the modernist tradition of disinterested art displaced subjectivin favor of the medium; the effect of Duchamp's (postmodern?) intervention ity was to expand the idea of medium to include the whole institution of art.The desubjectivizing strategy of the readymade, with its systematic work of negation and testing of the limits of what counts as art, has sustained art practice for most of the last century and continues to do so. Yet the dominance of the Duchamp effect may have blinded us to the legacy of the found object, which is less visible and less concerned with reflecting on and undermining the conventions and institutions of art.The examples of Mary Kelly and Gabriel Orozco show that there is a wealth of art that breaks the self-critical circle and opens itself to wider issues of subjectivity and sociality, loss and memory, love and death. As Zizek so pithily put it, with regard to cultural theory: "The celebrated postmodern 'displacement' of subjectivity rather exhibits an unreadiness to come to terms with the truly traumatic core of the modern subject."4My proposal for an aesthetic beyond the pleasure principle is aimed at approaching that core and so sets about complicating the tradition of Kantian disinterestedness and the displacement or effacement of subjectivity implied by the reiteration of the readymade. However, it retains the value Kant placed on the engagement with an opaque, elusive object that sets into play the senses, imagination, and understanding.
Iversen Professor Art History, is of of She Margaret University Essex,England. is the authorof Alois Riegl: ArtHistory Theory Mary and and She and (withDouglasCrimp HomiBhabha). alsoedited(withDana Kelly Art Arnold) andThought.

49. SlavojZizek, "Burning Bridges,"in The the Zizek Reader,ed. ElizabethWright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwells, 1999), ix.

57 art journal