| LDR Home | Index/Search | Leonardo On-Line | About Leonardo | Whats New |
|
|
|
|
|
Art, obsession and possession: Is Freud is still interesting? A review article by Robert Pepperell Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety and Myth and Metamorphosis: Picasso's Classical Prints of the 1930s A full version of this article can be found at: www.postdigital.org Hans Bellmer and Pablo Picasso are artists who have been characterised, in professional and personal terms, as both possessive and obsessive. If 'possession' and 'obsession' have a suitably Freudian ring it is because they chime with much contemporary scholarship seeking to treat artistic works as objects through which to construct the (absent) artist as psychoanalytic subject. The two examples of such methodology considered here, by Sue Taylor and Lisa Florman, both attempt to reassert the explanatory power of Freudian theory at a time when it seems in wider decline; one could even be forgiven for thinking that orthodox psychoanalysis had retreated from medical science into the highly subjective realm of art criticism. So, what can psychoanalytic theories contribute to our appreciation of art and our understanding of artists? For Taylor the art of Hans Bellmer is a psychoanalytic goldmine yielding rich nuggets of classic Freudianism: the Oedipal complex, the castration complex, fetishism, etc. are apparently all vividly (almost diagrammatically) represented in Bellmer's oeuvre. Much is made, for example, of the artist's relationship (or lack of) with his distant and authoritarian father, the compensatory over-affection for his mother and the obsessive attachment to his young female cousin. Using available biographical data and the artist's works as evidence, Taylor probes deep into the psyche of this complex, paranoid and highly articulate man in order to make a number of claims about his unconscious motives and desires. One such claim is made fairly tentatively early in the introduction: "I propose here that [Bellmer's] impassioned expressions of father hatred might work to cover over a repressed homosexual attachment, an hypothesis that runs counter to other psychoanalytic accounts of his oeuvre." (p. 13). To some this would seem an extravagant assertion since there is very little evidence of homoeroticism in Bellmer's art; yet by the end of the book it has become an almost indisputable fact: " . . . Bellmer sought punishment for his own deeply repressed homoerotic desires and murderous oedipal wishes through fantasmatic violence displaced onto the female body." (p. 198). This diagnosis may be consistent with Freudian theory but less convincing to anyone neutral, under-informed or critical about orthodox psychoanalytic doctrines. But if the standard Freudian explanations of Bellmer through his work remain dependent on questionable theories, Taylor's excavation of less familiar Freudian territory throws up more productive ideas. In the sections of the book dealing with the sensation of the "uncanny" a passage of Freud is quoted that draws magic back into the realm of civilisation through the agency of art: "In only a single field of our civilisation has the omnipotence of thoughts been retained, and that is in the field of art. . . People speak with justice of the 'magic of art' and compare artists to magicians. But the comparison is perhaps more significant than it claims to be" (p. 54). Perhaps Freud's familiarity with non-western beliefs left open in his mind the possibility that occult phenomena may exert real force, at least through art. Certainly the suggestions of occultism in Bellmer's work are pronounced, although Taylor does not mention them explicitly. Take, for example, the mystical belief in the possessive power of effigies (dolls, masks and fetishes) containing living forces or the figure of the Androgyne, a staple of occult ideas and a recurrent image in Bellmer. The Androgyne, both male and female, symbolised a concept largely alien to western empiricist logic -- the co-presence of opposites without contradiction or cancellation. Yet psychoanalysis is itself full of such paradoxes, and Taylor marshals several examples in her favour. She cites Donald Kuspit's post-Freudian definition of the fetish as "the illusory comfort of union with the mother and simultaneous disengagement, detachment, disidentification from her" (p. 60). The enigmatic suggestions of Freud in 'Totem and Taboo' combine with some elementary occult ideas and Bellmer's obsessive libido to concoct a heady brew of art, magic and desire. Bellmer's overriding need to possess in graphical form something of the female which always remains elusive, and thereby ever more desirable, leads him into a state of demonic possession -- possessed and repulsed by that which he wants to own, and through owning to become part of. It is these revelations in "The Anatomy of Anxiety" that I find most exciting and which I believe offer the most original interpretation of Bellmer's work, indeed much surrealist art and perhaps even the 'magical' evocations of art in general. To my mind this makes a far more gripping story than any amount imaginary lost penises or speculative homosexual attachments. As with Sue Taylor's book, Lisa Florman's revaluation of Picasso's classicist prints of the 1930s is deeply indebted to the concepts of Freud. Frequent reference is made to the notion of 'overdetermination', originally expounded in the 'The Interpretation of Dreams (1900)', which identifies a kind of simultaneous condensation and extension of connected images or thoughts, particularly prevalent in dreams. Florman uses this in her discussion of Picasso's etchings to map out the matrix of inter-linked symbols and references that bind together pictorial elements in the 'Vollard Suite' and the 'Minotauromachy' (p. 181). She contends this gives the apparently diverse series of prints, produced over some seven years an "astonishing coherence" and intimate inter-relatedness that adds to the richness of possible associations and interpretations. She goes so far as to suggest that the some plates of the 'Vollard Suite' in particular: "offer themselves as a kind of structural analogue of the Freudian unconscious, and that the patterns of viewing they encourage likewise resembles the desire-driven operations of the primary process." (p. 136). Whilst one set of plates is closely identified with the technical Freudian concept of the primary process, another is identified with its complement -- the secondary process. One section of the hundred or so prints produced by Picasso for the dealer and publisher Ambroise Vollard is titled the 'Sculptor's Studio' and depicts classical gods and nymphs, sculptors and models, in Elysian interiors gazing seductively at each other, or sculptures of each other, from reclining postures. For Florman this series is exceptional within the Suite as a whole in that it is made of images: "whose subject itself concerns the repression or sublimation of desire in the quiescent contemplation of art" (p. 137). Technically speaking, repression here is the mechanism whereby the primary process: "is directed towards securing the free discharge of quantities of excitation, while the second system, by means of the cathexes emanating from it, succeeds in inhibiting this discharge and in transforming the cathexis into a quiescent one" (Freud quoted p. 137). For me such close correlation between a technical medical theory and the interpretation of a series of etchings does offer something that enriches our appreciation of the images themselves. As Florman wishes to suggest, the view that classical art is somehow free-floating, disembodied and desire-less is successfully challenged by Picasso's skilful inscriptions of sublime erotic presence in "quiescent contemplation". The word 'cathexis', which Freud uses with reference to concentrations of psychic energy, derives from the Greek to hold fast or possess. Fascinatingly, in what seems to be a fortuitous case of overdetermination, the notion of possession raised earlier in respect of Bellmer finds resonance in Florman's citation of the critic Leo Steinberg who argued that: "to Picasso drawing was a form of "possession" or "inhabitation""(p. 116). Picasso himself claimed art was, both in conception and reception, "actual lovemaking" and Florman proposes that his multi-viewed distortions of the female form are: "the visual equivalent of an embrace" (p. 116) -- an attempt to consume, enter into, or become continuous with the object in view. This is one way in which, as Florman says in the preface, these images: "force the recognition that we can no longer separate subject and object ... in quite the way we might have once thought we could. The 'Vollard Suite' in turn suggests that all such negotiations between subject and object, self and something external, are intimately associated with the workings of desire" (p. XVII). This proposed continuity between subject and object is a fundamentally mystical proposition and returns us to the occultism we spoke of in relation to Bellmer. Much more could be said of the suggestions made here, but what is clear already is that orthodox Freudian analysis of art objects can offer useful insights into their creation and subsequent meaning. To project further into the artist's deepest psyche, I would argue, carries great risks and Florman's book wins out over Taylor's to the extent that the former limits her focus to the picture plane whilst avoiding excessive reliance on disputed theories. But what I think emerges from these two studies is a more interesting occult resonance of Freud's ideas, perhaps less easily digested by his orthodox subscribers. The close analyses of two oeuvres, Bellmer's fetishistic constructions and Picasso's deceptively simple line drawings, has exposed, for me at least, the inherently magical operation of art and the sorcerous powers of the artists. |
Contact LDR: ldr@leonardo.org
Contact Leonardo: isast@leonardo.info
copyright © 2002 ISAST