Parachute, 1 juin 1984, Juin - Août

[" art conte mpo rai n/contempdrary art juin, juillet, août 2* M^P/ie, July, Auguét 1§84 5,50$ ¦e\u2019Sî: il «9$ 0,{0 S3»** Sfe|i ¦ ife V Albrecht Dürer, Drawing, Nüremberg, 1525.The painted body \u2014 the central term of the classical concept of the picture \u2014 is that \u201cbody of the other\u201d traced and caressed by the moving hand of the painter.Thus, the painted body is the simultaneous trace of two bodies, and so is inherently erotic.And since, despite the sexist construction of art-historical language, the hand of the painter can be either male or female, and so can the painted body, painting retains in its interior a kind of paganism, a polymorphousness, even an androgyny, which is suspicious of all asceticism, all unhappiness, and all estrangement.This painted body, however, completes itself as picture by means of a mechanism, its everpresent armature, the mechanistic opticality of the perspectival code.The body is completed as picture in the projection of that kind of space which historically receives it and permits its fundamental theatrical act to take place.That act is the act of the body\u2019s encountering its own alienation from itself, its loss of its status as \u201ccouple,\u201d as two bodies bonded by the mark, in its disappearance into the spatial world of things and of measure along an optical, geometrical axis.It is along this axis that the painted, or the caressed body becomes separated into space and becomes \u201csingle.\u201d In this process the painted body is permeated with opticality and with geometry; it is, so to speak, disembodied by the action of its own projection into a thing-like world of measure.The inner drama of the picture is inescapable from this adventure of loss experienced by every painted and represented body, inescapable from the historical doubt thrown upon the caressed palpability of the figure by the kind of space which is its \u201cnatural\u201d home.As picture, the body shimmers on the verge of being an optical projection, a spectre, an effect of perspective.A projection always originates elsewhere than on a surface which can be touched.This is the source of the pathos of the \u201cpainterly hand\u201d or mark, which characterizes modernist painting throughout its history.Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque painting play all the variations of this dialectic, and historical \u2014 social, economic, political, and technological \u2014 modernization intensifies the grip of perspective on culture as a whole in the development of machines.Once the consequences of this modernization-process become experienceable as culture, painting\u2019s spiritual authority is disrupted.This spiritual (and erotic) authority rested on its \u201ccatholic,\u201d syncretic, and luxuriant inclusion of the palpability of the body within the rhythmic harmonies of an ideal space \u2014 an ideal church, an ideal text, an ideal city.Catholic, Baroque Europe modulated its mechanistic and progressive ideal with the curvature of the human forms which entwined to make its pictures.The meaning and value of painting\u2019s mechanized interior is transformed in the modernization process.The peopling of the city with machines which takes place in the 18th and 19th centuries accelerates the disembodiment of the figure which was inherent in perspective but was contained and limited by the character of the Ancien Régime.The hollowing-out or voiding of the pagan body by the systems of projection, opticality, and planning which were always present in painting takes place in the same historical process in which men, women, and children were bound to machines in the new division of labour.In Capital, Marx writes: While simple co-operation leaves the mode of working by the individual for the most part unchanged, manufacture thoroughly revolutionizes it, and seizes labour-power by its very roots.It converts the labourer into a crippled monstruo-sity, by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts; just as in the States of La Plata they butcher a whole beast for the sake of his hide or his tallow.Not only is the detail work distributed to different individuals, but the individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation, and the absurd fable of Menelus Agrippa, which makes man a mere fragment of his own body, becomes realized.1 Here, in 1867, is expressed the great inversion of the whole past form of \u201cthe human,\u201d the negation of the conditions under which all previous ideals of human unity could be sustained at the interior of cultural expression.Here, the division of labour and machine-industry generate phenomena whose cultural consequence is the revelation of the unravelling of the near-pastoral urban harmony of the classical ideal of earthly perfection, what ancient Greece called ka-lokagathia, with which perspective baptized itself in the Renaissance of Alberti, Piero, Leonardo, and Brunelleschi.Perspective becomes threatening at the moment that the determinate negation of the ideal of human wholeness and harmony is revealed in the Marxian image of the living body-part as the crux of culture.Perspective proved itself as a totalization, a transcendent quantitative cosmic design, and gained the status of Law in the Academy.It did not, however, automatically thereby destroy the conditions for the harmonious expression of the human body and human experience until historical development reveals capitalism\u2019s inherent negation of and hostility to the entire previous ideal of the complete development of the human being.In capitalism all bodies are projected as uniform functions of production and exchange, and can survive as bodies only insofar as they prove themselves as partial functions in the process of creation of surplus-value.The culture of the commodity is a totality guaranteed by the process of reduction of the ideal of completeness, unity, and harmony, identified with the image of the body in its space, to a state of fragmentation and homelessness.For the 19th century modernism exemplified by Manet, the fragmentation of the ideal of integrity and harmoniousness of the body and its space \u2014 and so of the conditions for spatial representation \u2014 is not something imposed from outside the régime of the picture, from \u201cindustry\u201d or from \u201cmass media.\u201d It emerges from within the historically law-governed concept of the picture itself.At the moment when science begins to appear culturally as marred with domination, painting begins its repulsion of itself from science, from the totality which produces the antithesis of integration, which produces the living body-part, the \u201cmass ornament,\u201d2 the modern worker, consumer, and spectator.Manet\u2019s expression of these conditions is so intensified that it is possible to see his work as a classicism of estrangement.The figures he paints and represents are simultaneously palpable, that is, traditionally eroticised, and yet disintegrated, hollowed, and even incipiently \u201cdeconstructed\u201d by their inscription with this crisis of perspective.In this process of emptying, they become emblematic of the new \u201cfragmentary\u201d type of person produced within capitalism, the person who \u201cempathizes with commodities.\u201d3 Some neo-conservative critics of Manet\u2019s recent exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York saw him as something less that a great painter, mainly because, in effect, he did not transcend the difficulties of his epoch.But his significance for us is in that apparent non-transcendence.It is the appearance of a non-transcendent cultural expression which alone can 6 bring out the distress implicit in the \u201cempathy with commodities.\u201d In The Phenomenology of Mind, Hegel says: \u201cThe distraught and disintegrated soul is.aware of inversion; it is, in fact, a consciousness of absolute inversion.The content uttered by spirit and uttered about itself is, then, the inversion and perversion of all conceptions and realities, a universal deception of itself and of others.The shamelessness manifested in stating this deceit is just on that account the greatest truth.\u201d4 Hegel also on this page identifies the distraught consciousness with wit, and a page or two earlier talks about this complete inversion of reality and thought, this state of utter estrangement as \u201cpure culture.\u201d5 This world-historical distress appears as the crisis of classical unity in Manet\u2019s pictures.This crisis is constituted by the positioning of the negated pagan body \u2014 the newly estranged body \u2014 within the negative persistence of perspective.Perspective for Manet cannot be abolished or transcended without abolishing the classical concept of the picture altogether and existing outside the law.At the same time, perspective\u2019s historical status as a law guaranteeing unity can no longer be experienced as a picture.In Manet, perspective begins its existence as a law which cannot live \u201cin and for itself\u201d; it persists only through the transgressions it provokes in the concept of the picture.Perspective is therefore a law guaranteeing estrangement in the experience of the painting.Estrangement experienced in the experience of the picture has become our orthodox form of cultural lucidity.Cultural lucidity is, in Manet\u2019s example, rooted in a historical process in which the ancient concept of the harmony and unity of the body and its space is destroyed by society and reconstituted by the artist in a \u201cruined\u201d state, an emblematic state in which its historically negated or outmoded character and meaning become perceptible.In fact, without this perception, Manet\u2019s work may have been difficult to perceive as a picture, as something governed and guaranteed as a picture by the law.Many of his works apparently suffered this difficulty in their various first showings, particularly in the Salon.For Manet, this state of unrelieveable tension in front of the work is the specific antithesis to the somnambulistic state of \u201cersatz unity\u201d which characterizes Salon pictures.The Salon masters of the Second Empire and the Third Republic were in fact far more collagiste in their eclecticism than was Manet in his dandyish witticism.But their perspective disavows its status as social ruin and strains to entrench itself as hypnotic, instrumental, and professional.These men are \u201cexperts.\u201d Since Manet cannot break with perspective and its concept of the picture, the Salon remains the inescapable centre-point of cultural lucidity for him, no matter how degraded it becomes.Its degradation, as evidence of the complete inversion of truth it embodies, makes the Salon the site of Hegel\u2019s \u201cpure culture,\u201d and, as such, the immanent home of Manet\u2019s scandals.In and around the Salon, Manet demonstrates decisively that the radical antithesis to instrumental, ersatz unity is not simply fragmentation, the culture of montage and of the snapshot which is already apparent in Impressionist informalism.The antithesis likewise is not a prim-itivist ideal of harmony constructed from archetypal bodies which alone can occupy the perfect space of unalienated perspective \u2014 or non-perspective \u2014 as in the proto-Symbolist works of Puvis de Chavannes or Gauguin.Manet\u2019s alternative consists in the negative, almost memorializing unification of the image around a ruined, or even a dead concept of the picture.The dead concept of the picture, when turned toward its immanent subject, \u201cthe painting of modern life,\u201d produces an image which is that of the mortification of modernity.With Manet, the realm of \u201cpure culture,\u201d the Salon, the régime of perspective, flares up and collapses into dust.In his work, the body of Antiquity and of Baroque Europe appears in a picture for the last time.Manet is the tombstone of the Salon.As such, he is outmoded by the developments in the new realms of modern art, the \u201cindependent spaces\u201d which reach their first maturity in the 1870s and 1880s, and which, in the intervening century, have become our site of absolute inversion, of \u201cpure culture.\u201d Manet was in a real sense without followers after his death.He is still in the happy position of being without followers.But the contemporary culture of absolute fragmentation which appears in and dominates the galleries of 1984 as both painting and photography has emerged historically from the long transformation of the \u201cindependent spaces\u201d of modern art of the 19th century into the museum-like, Salon-like precincts of our era.Manet shows that a decisive expression of modernism originated from the process of revealing an internally mortified concept of the picture and that that exposure was not bounded by the painting itself.Rather, it formed the social image of a decayed cultural epoch and in so doing, redefined cultural space.In this sense, it participated in the development of critical concepts about cultural space in general, concepts which were formulated sharply about fifty years after Manet\u2019s death by Brecht, among others.Brecht\u2019s notion of the \u201cfunctional transformation\u201d (Umfunktionierung) of modes of cultural production should be related to Manet\u2019s insistence on the \u201cWestern\u201d image as a ruin.Such a labour of relation would possibly create a means of access to the closed interior of the image in the dead concept of the picture which forms the empty centre of the \u201cSalonism\u201d of our period.This is a dual picture-type rooted in the institutionalized culture of fragmentation: totalized montage and \u201cabstract art.\u201d ¦ NOTES 1.\tMarx, Karl, Capital, Vol.1, ch.XIV, (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965) p.360.2.\tThe term is Siegfried Kracauer\u2019s.His essay, \u201cThe Mass Ornament,\u201d was published in English in New German Critique, No.5, Spring 1975, pp.67-76.3.\tcf.Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, (London: New Left Books, 1973).4.\tHegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Mind, translated by J.B.Baillie, ed.1966, (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1910), p.543.5.\tThe sentence is: \u201cThis type of spiritual life is the absolute and universal inversion of reality and thought, their entire estrangement the one from the other; it is pure culture.\u201d Ibid., p.541.This is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at the College Art Association annual Convention in Toronto in February 1984.It was my contribution to a session organized by Thierry de Duve of the University of Ottawa, entitled : Judging Modernity: Manet Revisited.The intention of this session was to discuss aspects of Manet\u2019s work which were relevant to our present cultural situation.En rappelant le rapport, établi à la Renaissance, entre le corps peint et le corps perspectivement représenté (logé dans un espace total avec lequel il était en harmonie), on souligne ici la crise de ce rapport (qui survivait, au 19e siècle, dans la peinture officielle, sur le mode abstrait, contradictoire) et partant la crise de l\u2019idée de tableau telle qu\u2019elle se donne à voir chez Manet.Si en effet Manet ne renonce ni à la perspective ni à l\u2019idée classique de tableau, celle-là ne subsiste plus dans celui-ci que comme \u201cruine\u201d: l\u2019espace perspectif ne réussit plus à loger la fragmentation (corrélative au mode de production capitaliste) de la vie moderne.Jeff Wall is an artist living in Vancouver.7 LE SUJET IMPRESSIONNÉ DANS SON SYMPTÔME Il y a, dans le champ d\u2019expérimentation de l'hystérie au XIXe siècle, une extraordinaire affinité élective du symptôme et de la figuration.Cette affinité (le fonctionnement de cette affinité) n\u2019aura peut-être pas été sans conséquence sur notre actuelle corn préhension tant du symptôme que de la figure, voire de la figurabili-té.Et cela, malgré ou à travers le bouleversement freudien lui-même.Car la clinique, au XIXe siècle, mit en oeuvre, systématiquement, cette affinité structurale: elle l\u2019aura donc sans cesse touchée du doigt, à défaut de l\u2019avoir pensée.Et elle l\u2019a mise en oeuvre, au sens où Claude Bernard définissait une telle opération comme un moment-clef de la méthode expérimentale: celle-ci ne se réduisant pas à l\u2019observation, disait-il, mais à l\u2019observation \u201cprovoquée\u201d, ce qui veut dire, premièrement l\u2019art d\u2019obtenir les faits, et deuxièmement l\u2019art de tes mettre en oeuvre1.Nous entendons déjà, ici, les deux mots \u201cart\u201d et \u201coeuvre\u201d.C\u2019est exemplairement que la clinique de l\u2019hystérie aura posé un problème d\u2019art à chaque fois qu\u2019elle se posait celui, épistémique, du symptôme.D\u2019une part, en effet, on a pu constater que l\u2019élaboration même de la notion d\u2019hystérie, par Charcot, s\u2019était réalisée dans l\u2019élément même (au sens hégélien) de la figuration; ses moyens conceptuels, autant que ses enjeux, furent ceux de la figuration: Charcot mit en oeuvre tout un champ figurai (photographique, sculptural, schématique, etc.) aux fins d\u2019établir la pérennité d\u2019une notion clinique conçue elle-même sous l\u2019espèce d\u2019un tableau (à tous les sens du terme, notamment celui du syn-optique rêvé en tant que pan-optique)2.D\u2019autre part, et comme réciproquement, cette clinique figurative du symptôme donna lieu à la première peut-être des grandes doctrines psychopathologiques de l\u2019art (cela se nommait alors \u201cétudes de critique médicale des oeuvres d\u2019art\u201d): dès 1857, Charcot publiait un article sur les marbres antiques3 et s\u2019intéressait à l\u2019iconographie de la possession, de l\u2019extase.À partir de 1888, les publications médicales de la Salpêtrière comportent une part non négligeable de textes concernant l\u2019histoire de l\u2019art.Mais c\u2019est dès 1887 que Charcot et Richer ont fait paraître leur étonnant et fameux ouvrage les Démoniaques dans l\u2019art, suivi deux ans plus tard d\u2019une étude sur les Difformes et les malades dans l\u2019art4, où il s\u2019agissait, littéralement, de voir et d\u2019analyser le symptôme hystérique \u201cà l\u2019oeuvre\u201d dans la peinture.Cela recouvrait et servait un fantasme: que tout le visible fasse figure, afin qu\u2019il soit lisible.On s\u2019aperçoit, à suivre le détail des protocoles expérimentaux, que ce fantasme en vint à fonctionner comme un impératif catégorique.Je voudrais montrer, sur un exemple très localisé, comment l\u2019opération photographique fut bien souvent au coeur de cette dialectique.J\u2019ai déjà tenté de mettre en évidence comment, à partir d\u2019un statut de preuve visible, elle en était venue à fonctionner comme production du visible, et production d\u2019une formalité du symptôme lui-même, à travers une utilisation complice de l\u2019hypnose.L\u2019on pourra peut-être suivre ici comment cette extrême attention ou expérimentation sur le visible put donner lieu à l\u2019invention (au sens archéologique comme au sens rhétorique) de quelque chose comme un statut du corps en tant que surface photographique.8 Il y a déjà une notion, fondamentale, qui fait noeud, ici, du prodige photographique et du prodige hystérique (dont le symptôme se définit presque, en son histoire, par le fait qu\u2019il échappe à sa compréhension \u201cmatérielle\u201d: c\u2019est, depuis toujours, un malum sine materia): il s\u2019agit de la notion d\u2019impressionnabilité.Dans les deux cas, l\u2019avènement spectaculaire et mystérieux du visible n\u2019est qu\u2019un phénomène de surface, à ce qu\u2019il semble, \u2014 mais une surface douée de sensibilité.On s\u2019acharnait depuis le XVIe siècle à autopsier les cadavres des hystériques, mais c\u2019était pour ne rien trouver dedans.Nous pouvons dire, de façon sommaire, que la notion d\u2019impressionnabilité prend au XIXesiècle le relai de celle, non moins magique, impalpable, des \u201cvapeurs\u201d hystériques.Et c\u2019est Briquet, en 1859, qui donne à l\u2019hypothèse toute son extension : 1° L\u2019impressionnabilité, augmentée de l\u2019élément affectif du système nerveux, constitue le fond de la prédisposition à l\u2019hystérie.2° L\u2019hystérie est presque spéciale au sexe féminin, parce que, chez lui, il existe une prédominance de cet élément affectif.3° Néanmoins l\u2019hystérie peut exister chez l\u2019homme, mais à la condition qu\u2019il y aura chez lui la même prédominance.4° On ne trouve pas dans l\u2019appareil génital de la femme la raison de cette spécialité; on la trouve dans le mode de sensibilité propre aux femmes (.).Il résulte de là qu\u2019on peut considérer l\u2019hystérie comme le produit de la souffrance de la portion de l\u2019encéphale destinée à recevoir les impressions affectives et les sensations.5 Une telle notion de l\u2019hystérie, comprise tout à la fois comme mal et prodige de l\u2019impressionnabilité, permet donc, en 1859, une première compréhension de sa plus extraordinaire vertu symptomatologique: celle de pouvoir reproduire exactement, mais sans aucune lésion concomitante, toutes les autres maladies.L\u2019impressionnabilité comme \u201cfond\u201d hystérique rendrait compte de sa capacité mimétique en quelque sorte absolue.Il n\u2019est pas indifférent de constater ici que ce texte est tout à fait contemporain de celui, fameux, où Baudelaire fustigeait en la photographie la même capacité de \u201creproduction exacte de la nature\u201d6.LE SYMPTÔME-CLICHÉ HYSTÉRIQUE Mais ce texte de Briquet ne fait pas que suivre de vingt ans le célèbre rapport d\u2019Arago sur le daguerréotype (c\u2019était un 3 juillet 1839).Il précède aussi, de vingt ans tout juste, la publication, par un médecin de l\u2019hôpital Saint-Antoine, à Paris, d\u2019un cas inédit et extraordinaire de \u201ctroubles vaso-moteurs de la peau observés sur une hystérique\u201d7.Cette publication est remarquable, d\u2019abord en ce qu\u2019elle est la toute première du genre8, ensuite parce qu\u2019y apparaissent, comme spontanément, deux formules étonnantes utilisées pour nommer la personne atteinte de ce symptôme: femme-cliché, femme autographique.C\u2019est une jeune femme dont l\u2019histoire, qu\u2019on nous relate, semble dominée par une espèce d\u2019occulte pouvoir du dedans sur la périphérie.Toute sa symptomatologie pourrait être lue comme un trajet du destin (la mort du père) vers le fond viscéral (l\u2019apparition des règles, les constrictions épigastriques), \u2014 et du fond viscéral vers les \u201csurfaces\u201d corporelles, affolées (mouvements convulsifs, grimaces, névralgies) ou obnubilées (pertes de connaissance, surdité, 9 NoUVEI.LR ÎCOKOCRÂfltTF DE {.A 5aU>ï\u2018 TÏUi.nr 7'.XVII i.XXV ¦ .mm DEMENCE PRECOCE CATATONIQUE DERMOGRAPHISME (L.Trepsal).Masson & \u20ac\u2022', Éds*eur$ anesthésies).L\u2019anesthésie de toute la surface cutanée semble constituer un trait majeur de cette symptomatologie; elle est d\u2019ailleurs, dans l\u2019hystérie, non seulement fréquente, mais encore considérée au XIXe siècle comme l\u2019un de ses traits caractéristiques.\u201cOn peut lui traverser de part en part la peau des membres, du ventre, des seins, de la face, sans qu\u2019elle ressente la moindre douleur\u201d.9 Or, à cette perte du sens, fait symétrie une fabuleuse capacité de la peau à reproduire exactement, est-il écrit, l\u2019urticaire, lorsqu'on la touche: une \u201curticaire curieuse et bien étrange, puisqu\u2019elle peut se limiter tellement au point touché, que l\u2019on peut tracer les caractères que l\u2019on veut sur la peau de cette malade\u201d10.Tout semble dit: la peau a perdu son sens mais, en retour, elle se stigmatise sur l\u2019absolue reproductibilité graphique du trait, du signifiant, du \u201ccaractère\u201d que tout un chacun voudra bien y tracer, y clicher.La peau a perdu son sens pour faire accueil au sens de l\u2019Autre.Femme-cliché, donc, ou bien femme autographique, \u2014 avec l\u2019ambiguité, on le voit, de cette dernière formulation.Car si l\u2019autoscopie hystérique (voir son propre visage du dedans) procède en quelque sorte de la plus excessive des appropriations (ce serait une \u201cidentification\u201d ayant traversé, détruit, toute les structures de la réflexivité), au contraire, dans ce que Dujardin-Beaumetz nomme ïautographie, les rapports du dedans au dehors, du sujet à l\u2019Autre, sont complexifiés à l\u2019extrême et ne permettent aucune circulation de la mêmeté {auto).En effet, la surface corporelle ne spécifie son sujet qu\u2019à devenir la pure surface d\u2019inscription du désir de l\u2019Autre.Ce symptôme est un effet d\u2019écriture où le scripteur n\u2019existera jamais qu\u2019en un perpétuel renvoi d\u2019existence et d\u2019identité.La peau s\u2019y écrit elle-même \u201csur\u201d elle-même, ou plutôt l\u2019écriture lui vient \u201cdu dedans\u201d; elle est surface et sujet de l\u2019inscription.Mais elle n\u2019existe comme telle que s\u2019écrivant d\u2019un Autre: le sens de l\u2019inscription ne lui vient que d\u2019un \u201cdehors\u201d.Plus précisément, l\u2019avènement de cette auto-graphie fonctionne comme l\u2019avènement quasi viscéral d\u2019une horripilation à l\u2019égard (au moindre contact) de l\u2019Autre.La nomenclature de l\u2019autographie, d\u2019ailleurs, évoluera.On parlera d\u2019\u201curticaire factice\u201d, \u201cgraphique\u201d ou \u201cnerveuse\u201d, de \u201cdermoneurose vasomotrice\u201d, de \u201cstéréographie cutanée\u201d, de \u201cstigmatographisme\u201d, et j\u2019en passe.La terminologie se fixera plus ou moins, vers 1890, sur l\u2019expression \u201ddermographie\u201c, ou mieux dermographisme.À cette époque également, le phénomène, considéré en 1879 comme \u201cfort curieux et extrêmement rare\u201d, aura occupé un champ nosologique beaucoup plus large.La thèse que T.Barthélémy consacre, en 1893, au dermographisme, s\u2019appuie déjà sur soixante-dix cas décrits12.On lira en 1901 que ce symptôme n\u2019est finalement \u201cpas très rare si on prend la peine de le rechercher\u201d13.Mais en-deçà du problème de nomenclature, la question de savoir de quelle opération subjective relève cette vertu \u201csensible\u201d ou \u201cimprimante\u201d de la peau, \u2014 cette question demeurait entière.Ou plutôt indécise dans sa formulation même: car elle ne cessa point de tenter une migration hors de son champ primitif d\u2019expérimentation, l\u2019hystérie, pour ne jamais cesser d\u2019y retourner.Certes, le dermographisme, en tant que trouble du fonctionnement des \u201cnerfs vasomoteurs de la peau\u201d, exige un \u201csystème nerveux spécialement susceptible, impressionnable et impressionné\u201d, écrit Barthélémy14.On le considérera donc comme une disposition élective du sexe féminin, chez lequel \u201cle système nerveux est plus vibrant, plus impressionnable\u201d15, \u2014 Phoiûîypïê H#ï'th$udf P*m c\u2019est-à-dire susceptible d\u2019hystérie.Car l\u2019hystérie n\u2019est après tout conçue, à la suite de Briquet, que selon le modèle optico-photographique de ce que Barthélémy nomme lui-même un \u201cappareil grossissant des impressions nerveuses\u201d16.Il faut également noter,dans l\u2019exposé des cas, la récurrente esthétisation du problème, où un cri- 10 tère de venustà, si je puis dire, vient se rabattre sur celui de l\u2019hystérie: l\u2019on dira communément que les peaux les plus susceptibles d\u2019être \u201ccli-chées\u201d sont les peaux les plus fines, les plus blanches, les plus lisses17.Cependant, ie dermographisme s\u2019essaie à être pensé hors du \u201cmonopole hystérique\u201d, comme l\u2019écrit Chambard, qui le décèle en 1889 chez un \u201cimbécile alcoolique\u201d18.De façon générale, cette migration hors du champ de l\u2019hystérie s\u2019opère en trois directions.Une première serait celle d\u2019une plus grande vérité du symptôme: je veux dire par là qu\u2019on cherchera le symptôme-cliché du côté de ce dont il est l\u2019exacte reproduction; \u201cnous trouvons\u201d, écrivent les docteurs Féré et Lamy, \u201cune prédominance chez deux catégories de malades: d\u2019une part, les femmes hystériques; d\u2019autre part, les individus déjà atteints d\u2019urticaire vraie\u2019\u201d19.Une seconde direction de recherche s\u2019essaie à engloutir la notion dans le grand fonds de l\u2019animalité.Il est vrai que les animaux, pas moins que les hystériques, sont éminemment hypnotisables: \u201cêtres inférieurs sans doute à l\u2019espèce humaine, mais doués comme elle de sentiments\u201d, c\u2019est ce que note Barthélémy en un chapitre de son livre où il nous décrit un exemplaire symptôme-cliché provoqué sur un pur-sang (car \u201cles pur-sang ont encore plus que les autres des nerfs et du sang sous la peau\u201d) ; et pour preuve, Barthélémy écrivait, sur les flancs de l\u2019animal, le mot \u201cSatan\u201d, en lettres capitales20.Enfin, cette extension du champ dermographique aura presque abouti à lui ravir son existence même de symptôme: migration vers l\u2019inexistence, ou tout au moins vers l\u2019épiphénoménalité.Le dermographisme, parce qu\u2019il couvre un champ nosologique relativement flou, à frontière de neurologie et de dermatologie, sera ainsi ramené au statut de syndrome (un symptôme commun à plusieurs affections), de pur \u201ceffet\u201d (par opposition au \u201ctrait caractéristique\u2019\u2019), de \u201csimple épiphénomène\u201d21.Le dermographisme n\u2019est peut-être qu\u2019un simple effet de surface.Mais c\u2019est un effet, un effet spectaculaire, du tact de l\u2019Autre, et même, on le comprendra, de son regard.En tant que tel, il relève déjà d\u2019une structure du fantasme hystérique.C\u2019est d\u2019ailleurs ce qu\u2019on ne manque pas de constater dans la \u201clittérature\u201d en question: car l\u2019hystérie ne cesse d\u2019y faire de subreptices retours.Ainsi, l\u2019épileptique atteint de dermographisme fera-t-il preuve de l\u2019incorporation d\u2019un trait hystérique dans la symptomatologie générale de son épilepsie22.Quoique Barthélémy ait quelque peu congédié l\u2019hystérie en avançant, outre l\u2019impressionnabilité, un facteur d\u2019intoxication dans la genèse du syndrome dermographique, cependant il la rappelle à lui, au bout du compte, lorsqu\u2019il en vient à considérer les troubles hystériques eux-mêmes sur le modèle d\u2019une auto-intoxication23.Enfin, le dermographisme est considéré par la plupart des auteurs comme un moyen, un chemin, une inclinaison vers l\u2019hystérie : car le sujet doué de cette figurale vertu du tégument sera, lit-on, immanquablement enclin à simuler les autres affections dermatologiques.Une suspicion clinique s\u2019attachera désormais à repérer, dans l\u2019évidence visible du symptôme-cliché, le désir de figurer un autre mal.\u201cComme tout cela est bien dans la note hystérique!\u201d, s\u2019exclame le médecin à propos d\u2019un \u201chomme-cliché\u201d qui contretypait la scarlatine un jour, la variole ou la rougeole le lendemain24.LA PEAU, COMME BLOC-MAGIQUE L\u2019avènement du graphique, que manifeste le symptôme-cliché, est donc à comprendre comme l\u2019intrusion toujours possible du fiction-nel dans la \u201cvérité du corps\u201d.Un exercice sans histoires de la médecine aimerait à se fonder sur la présupposition que le symptôme ne ment jamais, parle pour le sujet en énonçant sa vérité, même si celui-ci n\u2019est pas censé la maîtriser, la connaître ; on comprendra pourquoi le symtôme hystérique, qui comporte en son fond la tromperie du sujet et de l\u2019Autre, a pu fonctionner, aux dires mêmes de Freud, comme la \u201cbête noire\u201d de la médecine.En tant qu\u2019effet graphique, le symptôme-cliché est donc par nature en proie à la fiction, à l\u2019écriture, à la figure.Et ce que Freud nomme la figurabilité hystérique fonctionnera en tout cas, qu\u2019elle soit cause ou effet, comme l\u2019élément même de ce prodige du corps-surface.C\u2019est une figurabilité de l\u2019antithèse, du passage antithétique25.Dans les phases de ce que les médecins nomment eux-mêmes le \u201cdéveloppement\u201d du cliché dermographique, on assiste en réalité à un double passage: d\u2019une part, la surface cutanée passe du blanc de l\u2019état normal au rouge de la trace localisée, et celle-ci à son tour (tout en restant trace, c\u2019est-à-dire différence) revient au blanc-, d'autre part, dans le temps même de cette métamorphose colorée, s\u2019effectue un autre passage qui, de profondeur (système vasomoteur de la dilatation et de la contraction des vaisseaux sanguins sous-cutanés) fait surface (coloration de la trace), et de la surface en vient à faire relief : car, en blanchissant, la trace s\u2019horripile, selon un phénomène un peu comparable à la \u201cchair de poule\u201d, \u2014 elle se cliche au sens typographique (le cliché est, en gravure, une plaque métallique en relief sur laquelle on peut tirer tous les exemplaires d\u2019une composition typographique).Ce que Dujardin-Beaumetz nomme la \u201csaillie blanche\u201d de la trace fait un relief qui va \u201cs\u2019accusant de plus en plus jusqu\u2019à atteindre un millimètre et demi à deux III.3 DLKMOGKAFHiSM!: ROt*«.K HT HJ.AN millimètres d\u2019épaisseur\u201d26.Barthélémy fera surenchère jusqu\u2019à six millimètres.Mais la véritable surenchère se perçoit plutôt dans les catégories mêmes de la description, qui vont, elles, se métaphorisant: plus précisément, le vocabulaire descriptif du phénomène fera feu de toutes les subtilités et richesses d\u2019une sémantique picturale, tentera indéfiniment une ekphrasis du passage coloré, dont l\u2019un des moments-clefs concerne évidemment la question de l'incarnat27: cela n\u2019est pas pour nous étonner, pour autant que le symptôme-cliché touche de près à de très vieux fantasmes fi-guraux.Car il donne corps au trait, au tracé, il \u201crelève\u201d, met en relief le dessin, selon une opération qui est contemporainement l\u2019opération même de la couleur: une montée locale du sang vers la surface, du dedans, \u2014 c\u2019est ce que Hegel nommait l\u2019\u201canimation intérieure\u201d du coloris, dans l\u2019incarnat qui, pour cela, fonctionne selon lui comme l\u2019idéal même de la picturalité en ses matériaux sensibles28.Le trouble du sang au coeur de l\u2019être, sa montée symptomale vers les surfaces corporelles, cela est donc à comprendre comme le comble d\u2019une mimésis picturale; c\u2019est en même temps ce par quoi les médecins (Meinert par exemple) ont bien souvent tenté de rendre compte d\u2019une étiologie des maladies mentales.Ces deux constellations se rencontrent, font connivence dans le dermographisme.La métaphorisation du symptôme, cependant, se cristallise encore autour du mot cliché.L\u2019idée du relief typographique est bien sûr fondamentale: l\u2019ampleur du relief fonctionne ici comme critère de l\u2019intensité ou de la pureté du symptôme; la forme fruste du dermographisme est sa forme dite \u201cplate\u201d; le \u201cgrand dermographisme\u201d qualifie au contraire la forme la plus saillante29.Et si la persistance de l\u2019effet dermographique est fort variable, de la demi-heure à quelques jours, l\u2019indéfinie reproductibilité du processus n\u2019en constitue pas la moindre magie.C\u2019est une magie typographique (le léger relief) et c\u2019est aussi une magie photographique: prodige de l\u2019impressionnabilité immédiate d\u2019une surface pelliculaire.Entre l\u2019optique et le textuel.La notion de graphie recouvrant ici tout à la fois la griffe d\u2019une écriture originaire, figurative (Bil-derschrift), \u2014 et la répétition, la persistance du stigma, sa possible reconduction en textualité, en sens.Quelque chose, donc, comme un Wunderblock, un bloc-magique, dont on sait que Freud, entre l\u2019optique et le scriptural, fit justement métaphore pour l\u2019appareil psychique30.Le symptôme dermographique serait ici comme une mise en portrait du feuilletage, de l\u2019exfoliation, de la folie même d\u2019une notion du sujet.Car il met en déroute, dans son processus même (et comme le Wunderblock), les notions de dehors et de dedans, par exemple: le gramme qui s\u2019y produit, produit \u201cl\u2019espace et le corps de la feuille elle-même\u201d, et il produit bien aussi quelque chose comme une \u201cstratification de surfaces dont le rapport à soi, le dedans, n\u2019est que l\u2019implication d\u2019une autre surface\u201d31.Il produit la trace et le moment même de son effacement.Il est un acte de gravure où la surface ne cesse de retourner à sa virginité, sa capacité à recevoir un nouveau clichage.Ce dont les médecins ne parlent pas, à propos du dermographisme, c\u2019est l\u2019effet de mémoire qu\u2019une telle écriture \u201cintradermique\u201d32 peutsus- 11 >>rv n A'!.\t, ., .'', \u2022' ¦}fù> '» \u2019 \\ \u2022 i: DAVID BOLDUC Galerie Don Stewart and Art 45, in collaboration with Galerie Gilles Gheerbrant, Montreal February 4-23 EXCHANGES Saidye Bronfman Centre, Montreal January 17 - February 16 CHROMAZONE Concordia Art Gallery, Montreal February 8 - March 3 Perhaps in an unacknowledged celebration oi Toronto\u2019s sesquicentennial, Montreal, late this winter, saw an uncommon host of contemporary Toronto painting.Of the fifteen artists represented among these three exhibitions, none is over forty, and while their youth shows verve and energy, it also speaks of their status as the children of Expressionism, and the easy or uneasy relationship they have with that tradition, marks the manner in which they wear their heritage.Brian Burnett, T.V.Support System, 1983, acrylic on canvas, 167,6 cm X 205,7 cm, photo : courtesy of the Saidye Bronfman Centre.VO ' Aware of the violence I do to their individual distinctions, and ignoring some exceptions, I would like to treat the participants of these shows as being members of one or the other of two types.The first group is constituted solely by David Bolduc, natural successor and heir to pioneer abstract Expressionism.On the other side are the ChromaZone group and the ten artists of E(x)changes (Michael Merrill, Cathy Daley, Brian Burnett, John Scott et al.) who, together, represent the descendants of figurative Expressionism.This division establishes two opposing cosmologies, and illuminates an informative difference.Ever precocious, David Bolduc appears with all the confidence, maturity, and relaxed skill of a much older master.But this is simply a first order response, limited to the satisfaction and resolve produced within the frames of the work.What is the significance of such strong harmony?I suggest it describes an attitude in concert with the world it perceives.Bolduc\u2019s paintings project a benign environment, his bouquets and fruit trees evoke a munificent nature and his use of scraps of words, letters, and printed matter, as collage elements, in this instance, forms a sense of the media as a source of connection to both the distant and the past.Rae Johnson, Vacation #2, 1982, acrylic and sand on chipboard (two sections), 243,8 cm X 243,8 cm, photo : courtesy Mackenzie Art Gallery.mm .: .: ' 35 Bolduc\u2019s use of the line is particularly noteworthy: he rings the changes of all its functions: lines designating borders, indicating directions and flows, forming figures, shapes and letters.Lines found in corrugation and raking, crosses, crescents and spirals.Lines determining structures and frames, drawing ladders and branches.The anthropologist Clifford Geertz has an apposite and analogous comment, on the Yoruba tribe of Nigeria: The Yoruba associate line with civilization : \u201cThis country has become civilized,\u201d literally means, in Yoruba, \u201cthis earth has lines upon its face.\u201d .[The Yoruba concern for line] grows out of a distinctive sensibility the whole of life participates in forming \u2014 one in which the meanings of things are the scars that men leave on them.1 What is primary for Bolduc is the affirmative capacity to make a mark \u2014 as a sign of both cultural and personal presence.Making marks defines the artist as the producer of ritual-bound objects, with an integrated relationship and access to a larger community of observers.For the others, the figuratives, the artist is portrayed as an urban exile, whose act of painting both defines the boundary of separation and provides a point where contact can be breached.Against Bolduc\u2019s civilized and educated linearity, they posit a violent tonality \u2014 raw, garish slampainting of an anxious cityscape.Again, while the visual perception of unease is only of the first order, a function of unsettled novelty and disorientation, it is also indicative of a more substantial condition of distance and despair.Adopting a retro-symbology, almost by rote, they have re-introduced the iconography of good and evil as active forces.The reliance on this symbology is closely related to and recapitulates the vision presented of the artist\u2019s role in society.As another anthropologist, Mary Douglas, has written, in discussing the cosmology of witchcraft, \u201cit takes a certain kind of social experience to start to worry about the problem of evil.Not everyone can perceive it as a problem at all.\u201d2 As secular demonolo-gists, the figuratives have revitalized a forgotten animus.With Brian Burnett\u2019s sinister floating eyes among the trees of the city, we have the projection of a hostile, malevolent environment.Here nature is not bounteous, but haunted.In a Manichean rejection of external mediation, language and the media, especially television, are depicted as the source of a kind of plague.It is interesting that William Burroughs should be enjoying a bit of a revival now, when we recall his notion of words as \u201cvirus,\u201d for the concepts of poison, pollution and plague are of particular importance to evil-fearing cosmologies.Anti-media, and often anti-intellectual, the figuratives appeal for an antidote to the unsavoury influences of established forums.Art, in its ability to render and depict, is granted the power of immediate and direct transmission, against the uncertainty and distortions of mediating agencies.While artists of this century focussed their critical attention on the institutional context of the art activity, here the innovation is in the attempt to refute and overcome the authority of the framework by claiming direct and immediate contact.Defined by their reception, these two artist types delineate distinct communities and relationships to those communities; Bolduc\u2019s cosy and cosmopolitan accommodation and the dread and guilty frenzy of the figuratives draw quite different boundaries through and around the city they happen to cohabit.ROBERT GRAHAM NOTES 1.\tQuoted in LIEBERSON, Jonathan, \u201cInterpreting the Interpreter\u201d; New York Review of Books, March 15, 1984, pp.39-40.2.\tDOUGLAS, Mary, Natural Symbols, (Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1978), p.145.Michael Snow, Projection, 1970, two colour lithographs on Arches paper, 51 cm X 61,2 cm.MICHAEL SNOW Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston January 29 - March 41 In the adult, novelty always constitutes the condition for orgasm.Sigmund Freud It is best to approach this monumental retrospective of Walking Woman Works (1961-67) through a work which stands, both chronologically and ideologically, on the periphery of the exhibition.The 1970 lithograph Projection is cloistered away in a far corner of the exhibition, in a small room which also contains the initial working drawings for the W.W.(Walking Woman) image.Produced three years after the \u201cofficial\u201d end of this series, Projection gives both the artist and the viewer a chance to reflect on the intent of series.The image is a blovy-up of an out-take from Snow\u2019s 1964 film New York Eye and Ear Control (subtitled \u201cA Walking Woman Work\u201d).Printed in white ink on black paper it is initially a very difficult image to read, and Snow suggests that this was a deliberate attempt to re-create \u201cthe way you see a film image on a screen, where there is no light in the dark part\u201d (catalogue text).In the lower left corner of the print is a small W.W.image which stands as the symbol of the series and Snow\u2019s trademark.Next to this running across the bottom of the print is the following text : TITLE.EXCUSE.EXPLANATION.ENDORSEMENT.RATIONALIZATION.EQUIVALENT.ANALYSIS.DEFENSE.EXTENSION.COMMENTARY.(SUB-TITLE)\u2014-PROJECTION.OF A FRAME FROM A 1964 FILM TO A 1970 LITHOGRAPHIC PRINT.PRESENT FUCKS PAST.WHITE INKS BLACK PAPER (LIGHT FUCKS DARKNESS.WET FUCKS DRY.SOFT FUCKS HARD).MALE CHAUVINIST PRINT.THE \u2014 KING WOMAN MEETS HER MAKER.A SYMBOL \u2014 MINDED EXAMPLE.CUNTLESS PRICK PRINTS=FAKE FUCK.ENLARGEMENT ART.HARD-ON/CUT OUT.PRESENCE MAKES ABSENCE.TOKEN POKIN\u2019.FLAT FUCK.ART OF LOVE.MUSEPOSED PRINTER COURSE.16MM.8\" .5'.18\" X 131/2\".24\" X 20\"-LAY.At first glance both image and text appear to be sensationalists and the product of another one of Snow\u2019s witty punning games, e.g.\u201cThe phallic image also relates to film projection; it\u2019s a pun but it\u2019s also true\u201d (catalogue text).But a prolonged look exposes its position as a trope which reveals the structuring absences underlying the W.W.series.In this print the W.W.image takes on a negative position, in contrast to her positive, cutout presence in the series, and is acutely fucked by the male presence whom we must assume is the artist/maker.It is in this sense that the \u201cPRESENT FUCKS PAST,\u201d that \u201cPRESENCE MAKES ABSENCE,\u201d and the W.W.meets her \u201cmaker.\u201d With this retrospective gesture Snow has layed open the series and revealed the libido that guided its making.The continual distortion of the W.W.becomes a violent, aggressive act, rather than mere formalist freeplay.By violating the form of the W.W.Snow forces us to notice its position within the series; and it is an awareness of this violation which constitutes the content of the W.W.series.With this in mind we can read the series on a number of levels.When first encountering this exhibition one is immediately overwhelmed by Snow\u2019s variations on the W.W.theme.This is quite clearly the product of a fertile and wide reaching mind.But the question that must be asked is whether this is merely novelty for the sake of novelty?Was Snow simply attempting to engage in what might be called an \u201cerotics of the New\u201d?From his statements about the work this would appear to be true.In his 1962-63 text, \u201cA Lot of Near Mrs.,\u201d Snow outlined his W.W.project: \u201cRepetition: Trademark, my trade, my mark\u201d; \u201cMy subject is not women or a woman but the first cardboard cutout of W.W.I made\u201d; \u201cA representation can be used for something else.I will take orders for any use to which \u2018she\u2019 might be put.Art pimp.Lady fence, lady table, lady chair, lady lamp, rubber (ballon) lady, water bottle lady, fur lady, stained glass lady, lady road sign, lady shovel, lady car, lady dart board, lady hat rack, leading lady, first lady, lady like.\u201d In this statement and certainly in this exhibition it becomes clear that Snow subverted the representational status of the W.W.image to the point of destroying any discourse with that image.As such we are presented with a configuration of opposing forces, which on the one hand offers a mass banalization of content through the repetition of the W.W.image, and on the other a formal impulse toward the New (foldages, assemblages, construction, multi-media).But there is a consistency, a blurring of contradictions, in Snow\u2019s experimentation which belies the New, so that even the New becomes stereotypical.For Snow the process of perception appears to have become an aesthetic end in itself.But perhaps this is to underestimate Snow\u2019s project, for these observations are made only within the context of the exhibition where everything is reduced to a representational status.Instead we must acknowledge that Snow both proffers and negates an \u201cerotics of the New.\u201d But it is only with the knowledge of Projection that an understanding of this antinomy is possible, for in this print Snow replaces an \u201cerotics of the New\u201d with an \u201cerotics of the Self.\u201d What was once the presence is now the absence, replaced (fucked) by a new guiding presence, the New is subsumed and directed by the Self.I suggested above that it was perhaps impossible to see these works as New within the context of an exhibition which reduced all the works to a representational status; an ordered way of seeing.In an interview with Louise Dompierre (curator of the exhibition) Snow looked back over the series and offered the following observations : I was interested in seeing \u2014 often I would see things, signs or anything as art because if you turn on our art perception way of looking, you can look at anything as art ; what it is is a trained way of looking.Art galleries are places where art is placed ; you come in and turn on your trained way of looking so I wondered what would happen if one made something that was art and put it in other settings.Would it still be art?Could you see it as art?Would other people see it as art?What kind of interrelationships would develop?In this passage Snow suggests that we, as viewers, bring to every experience certain patterns and viewing orientations, which include specific expectations, and which filter out unnecessary (or what we consider unnecessary) external stimuli; in this case those stimuli 36 Barbara Kruger, We will undo you.unao you which would deny the object an art status.If, Snow postulated, we moved art outside its typical environment, outside of our experience patterns, would it still be art?Although Snow was not among the first to make these observations, his work of the early 1960s does stand as an instance of the desire to transgress the restrictive boundaries of modernism.Long before Keith Haring, Snow was placing his W.W.trademark in the subways and on the street; attempting to break down our \u201cart perception way of looking,\u201d our drive toward order in the perception of art.In doing so Snow suggests that the purpose of art is to reveal the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known.Even a cursory glance at the exhibition reveals Snow\u2019s delight in making objects unfamiliar and discontinuous, in breaking down our relationship to things.The foldages, the canvas constructions such as Gone (1963) or Interior (1963), and the mixed media constructions such as Morningside-Heights (1965) or Sleeve (1965), all increase the difficulty and length of perception, all act on \u201cour art perception way of looking.\u201d But what is seriously lacking in this exhibition is a sympathetic documentation of Snow\u2019s \u201clost\u201d art; his subway art, furniture, curtains, magazines, books; and not only these \u201cart objects\u201d but the cultural acts that accompanied them, i.e.the placement of the work in a cultural space (as adversed to a museum space), on construction sites, the door of an automobile, in the crowds at Expo 67.The irony of Snow\u2019s statement lies in the fact that everything in this exhibition has been brought back into an ordered way of seeing.These are things/events which might have placed the art in question, and instigated an \u201cerotics of the New.\u201d Yet once again the position of Projection comes into play.In this work Snow, in a formal sense, completely transgresses the traditional concept of the print and film-still, but more importantly alters our perception of the W.W.series.So that works that originally were intended to encompass a cultural act and an anti-museum act now (in relation to Projection) reveal themselves as a sexual act; and once again \u201cour art perception way of looking\u201d is called into question, but no longer in merely a formal sense.I have suggested that the works in this exhibition are about formal freeplay, about the erotics of the New and the Self, about the restrictive nature of exhibitions and retrospectives, and sexuality \u2014 but it seems that they are also (or perhaps wholly) about something else entirely.They are concerned with what is unsaid and undone, with those absences which form the deep structure of meaning.In Snow\u2019s work it isn\u2019t just that \u201cPRESENT [art] FUCKS PAST [art],\u201d or that after the series had ended critics, curators and viewers reduced its potential for meaning to formalist freeplay.It has more to do with our desire to use art as a means of denying our expectations and experience patterns so that we may experience the erotics of the New.But sooner or later in an effort to establish meaning for the work we constantly re-structure and re-order the art into a signifying whole, so that we may give it some representational status.In Projection Snow suggests that art will always be used as an \u201cEXCUSE.ENDORSEMENT.RATIONALIZATION.DEFENSE.\u201d of itself, it is in its own right a desire to order meaning.Whether in the realm of performance, video, installation, multi-media, word art, or whatever, we are faced with object/events that cannot deconstruct themselves, only the viewer can do this, and more often than not there is nothing there to initiate that desire.We constantly deny the absence that structures, and seek meaning only in the presence.BRUCE GRENVILLE NOTES 1.In the coming months this exhibition will travel to the Dal-housie Art Gallery, Halifax (May 31 - July 1, 1984); the London Regional Gallery, London (July 15 - August 26, 1984); the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, Victoria (September 13 - October 21, 1984); and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto (November 3,1984 - January 13,1985) THE REVOLUTIONARY POWER OF WOMEN\u2019S LAUGHTER A.R.C., Toronto February 4-28 The Revolutionary Power of Women\u2019s Laughter came to Toronto preceded by two misrepresentations.One was an article in Vanguard magazine by a New York critic.The other was the title itself.Both led to disappointment on seeing the exhibition, but we need only deal with the second since it is integral to the exhibition, although not necessarily serving it or the artists: Mike Glier, Ilona Granet, Jenny Holzer, Mary Kelly, Barbara Kruger and Nancy Spero.An immediate reaction to the exhibition was that there was no laughter \u2014 in the work or on the part of the audience.There was some depicted \u201cshouting,\u201d but no laughter.In what sense is laughter taken in the title?And in what respect is this \u201crevolutionary power\u201d power or revolutionary?Since this is a thesis exhibition and the works are taken as examples, the theoretical framework as set out by the curator Jo-Anna Isaak in her accompanying text has first to be stated.This framework is French theory of the Text based on Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva and others, synthesized and popularized by Roland Barthes.\u201cText\u201d is broadly conceived as a signifying practice in general : thus the language works in the exhibition (Holzer, Kelly), the photo-textual works (Kruger), and the more \u201ctraditional\u201d painting forms (Glier, Granet and Spero) all fall under its purview.If \u201cthe speaking subject is subjected to and constructed by language,\u201d1 we can take language here also to be syntax of images or the relation between an image and a text.\u201cSubjected to and constructed by\u201d can mean subjected to the image-prac- tice of mass-production, for instance advertising that constructs a subject and a look, as well as the construction of codes of representation in artistic practices and conventions.These codes, conventions and representations are part of the symbolic order which is constituted by the \u201cLaw of the Father,\u201d an order that represses \u201cwhat is termed variously the discourse of the Other, the desire in language, or what for the French feminist theorists of female \u2018difference\u2019 is the female.\u201d All the same, logically, these are represented within and between the interstices of the text.Not only is the subject constructed in totality, reality is as well.Reality is taken as a text, as what is already written, a structure of \u201cdomination in this form of society (call it the paternal, the phallic, the symbolic).\u201d How does one confront that order?\u201cTo accept the text, to remain within the symbolic function., is to be subject of others\u2019 discourse \u2014 hence tributary of a universal law.To reject the text is to find oneself alien, silent or exposed to the psychosis that appears on the signifying borders of our culture.The only alternative is to seek the pleasure of the text, either by playing upon the codes already in place, or by finding passages through them, in a word the French recently have reactivated in English \u2014 jouissance.It is the potential of this jouissance that the exhibition The Revolutionary Power of Women\u2019s Laughter\u2019 intends to explore.The exhibition constitutes a reading of the text which is no longer consumption, but play.\u201d But perhaps play is only the ruse of consumption.It remains to be seen whether \u201cplay\u201d is the only alternative, or whether \u201cpleasure\u201d itself and its attendant critical practice have been determined in a specific moment in late capitalism, where activity can be reduced to its simulation (\u201cplay\u201d) in textuality.\u201cReality,\u201d \u201ctext\u201d and \u201cplay\u201d are three terms we should interrogate; but given the review format, we can con- 37 centrate on \u201cplay,\u201d which all the same should not be thought as the mediating term between \u201ctext\u201d and \u201creality.\u201d To maintain some relation to activity, or critical effectivity (but the limits of this effectivity are blurred in this theory), we have to keep some distinction between \u201ctext\u201d and \u201creality,\u201d which is where \u201crepresentation\u201d enters, in order that the \u201crevolution\u201d does not remain textual.And what if we should think that the work in this exhibition is more \"serious\u201dthan this \u201cplay\u201d?Contrary to Isaak, it seems that the work does deal with consumption, not play, but not a passive consumption, rather a readdressing of the conditions of consumption.Thus the work in this exhibition does not \u201cconstitute a reading of the text\u201d but addresses an audience.The work is only partly directed to other texts, to \"inter-textuality,\u201d only insofar as some may use the conventions and strategies of advertising.The work is addressed to an audience, and in some cases an institutional setting.(Although that audience may be recuperated into a textual theory as no more than the text: a \u201ctissue of quotations.\u201d) Behind that address, which is an intention and not merely a (textual) strategy, is an announcement, which brings the work into relation with its institutional setting.This announcement, besides the address to the viewer, is directed to power, but by assuming power for itself, power is not avoided through play.If the code attributes identity and \u201creality,\u201d it can be played against through \u201cthe fundamental discoveries of modern linguistics and psychoanalysis \u2014 discoveries made possible by the opening of the gap between signifier and signified [which] had a radical effect on the understanding of the operations of signifying systems.\u201d This has had the double effectof, on the one hand, displaying the mechanisms whereby a signifying system, which is really in a state of continuous process or production, loses its transparency and immediacy, and on the other hand, opening the space for a manipulation of the code \u201cthrough play, jouissance, laughter.\u2018A code cannot be destroyed, only played off (Barthes).\u201d Are these the constructions and conditions by which these works address us in the gallery?What are the codes Glier, Granet, Holzer, Kelly, Kruger and Spero play oJf ?It seems that Glier, Granet and Spero play off and reinforce pretty traditional graphic conventions: there is a play only in the content as a simple reversal of value.For instance Mike Glier\u2019s banal photo-lithographs, the caricatures in White Male Power, by the only male in the exhibition, are juxtaposed to the hero-icizing of hitherto passively represented subjects and elevation of \u201ccraft\u201d in his two Shouting Women, painted robustly on stretched fabric.Similarly Ilona Granet simply presents an image in Bums/Bombs rhetorically equating authority and weaponry.This literally is sign painting according to iconic conventions, not a sign system nor the disruption of a code or the conditions of address.Nancy Spero\u2019s scrolls of multiply hand-stamped figures overlaying a range of representations of women are images of \u201cthe jouissance of the female body\u201d not \u201can alternative inscription.\u201d \u201cDifference\u201d is there by declaration, as in Isaak\u2019s text: thus the function of the Hélène Cixous quotation in Spero\u2019s Let the Priests Tremble (\u201cLet the priests tremble, we are going to show them our sexts! Too bad for them if they fall apart discovering that women aren\u2019t men, or that the mother doesn\u2019t have one.\u201d) The running, dancing figures in To the Revolution are images calling forth the code, which is the title as well, in the same manner as a cliché, signifying \u201crevolution,\u201d \u201cliberation.\u201d The more formal, \u201ctheoretical\u201d work in the exhibition is that by Holzer, Kelly and Kruger.Significantly, it is language and photographic work in these cases, work that is more open to manipulating commercial codes and representations; and women are not so much represented in these works as they are positioned.These are positions of construction and address, which are inseparable.Isaak signals Mary Kelly\u2019s well-known and well-travelled Pcst-Partum Document as the historical and theoretical basis for the exhibition.It is a significant work, and the one that probably most satisfies the criteria of Isaak\u2019s essay for the construction of sexual difference.In Kelly\u2019s piece, this construction takes place through the socialization process of the child, which is that of the mother as well.It is here that Kelly makes her intervention into psychoanalytical theory on the part of the mother\u2019s desire and the possibility of female fetishism.On the other hand, the work intervenes into artistic practice \u2014 what is thought of as a \u201cnatural\u201d women\u2019s practice in art \u2014 and into the institutional museum apparatus.She says \u201cthe framing, for example, parodies a familiar type of museum display insofar as it allows my archaeology of everyday life to slip unannounced into the great hall and ask impertinent questions of its keepers,\u201d although the parodying of codes here is not so apparent as the intervention of its content.The last of the Documents, Part VI, was shown at A.R.C.: \u201cPre-writing, alphabet, exergue and diary,\u201d but without the notes that usually seem to append its exhibition.The piece closes the socialization process with the double loss to the mother through the child\u2019s full entry into the symbolic order through language and schooling.This is displayed by the three registers of the child\u2019s script and her own writing on fake Rosetta Stones.It is significant that Kelly does not use images of herself or her child in the work intending rather to display femininity and motherhood not as natural and pregiven entities but as social constructions and representations of sexual difference within specific discourses.For her part, Barbara Kruger takes advantage of the conditions but not the images of advertising.The photo-stat blowups of found, but staged, photographs and her own scripted texts have the look of advertising.But their own power exceeds playing off advertising\u2019s codes.While Kruger uses the indexical shifter \u201cyou\u201d to great effect, there is no doubt who is addressed by that \u201cyou\u201d in its repetition: \u201cYou are seduced by the sex appeal of the inorganic\u201d; \u201cYou thrive on mistaken identity\u201d; \u201cYou have searched and destroyed\u201d; \u201cMemory is your image of perfection.\u201d It is not an intertextual effect that the shifter would lend support to, but a direct address to its viewers who are positioned differently according to their sex.While Kruger plays off the directness of advertising, Jenny Holzer plays on the formal strengths of art strategies.We have seen the Truisms and Inflammatory Essays already in Toronto as part of an A Space series where the Essays were placed in the street week by week.At A.R.C.fifteen were placed in a Carl Andre checkerboard on the wall.In theory, identity is subverted here, not by repetition, but by contradiction of the ensemble of statements.In reality, the statements are contradicted by their formal presentation and their inability to subvert gallery codes and contexts even when they are placed in the street.Both Holzer and Kruger address the viewer within an abstract, generalized field, like advertising, the conditions under which we are commonly addressed, and in the case of Kruger\u2019s work, women are socially constructed.Mary Kelly\u2019s work, on the other hand, deals witht common but specific social and economic constraints.The most theoretical, it is also the most personal, and consequently the most satisfying work in the exhibition in its struggle between the two.ROLAND BRENNER BILL WOODROW Mercer Union, Toronto February 14 - March 3 An important component to this show lies in the relationship that is presented by the coupling of Wood-row and Brenner.This is significant on two accounts.Firstly, both Woodrow and Brenner share a common \u201cpoint of origin\u201d in that they both spent their formative years under the tutelage of the St.Martins School of Art in England.(Woodrow is said to have been a student of Brenner\u2019s at one point.) Secondly, both artists have been (or still are) on the leading \u201cedge\u201d of British sculpture at different points in time.Brenner in the sixties as part «of the \u201cNew Generation\u201d lead by Tucker, King and Caro, along with Ainsly, Louw, etc.Woodrow on the other hand falls into the contemporary classification of sculpture re-directing the focus back to its \u201cobjectness\u201d but with certain important modifications which sets him apart from many of his peers, such as Kapoor, Opie and even Cragg.The significance of this coupling resides in Brenner\u2019s shift from the kind of work that he was previously concerned with.A type of work which became synonymous with the constructive principles of welded steel sculpture.A preoccupation dominated by a concern for spatial relations, where the works\u2019 unity was determined by a part to whole relationship.The emphasis here lies in the process and materials.What is most significant in comparison to the dominant mode of production referred to as Modernist is that Brenner and Woodrow\u2019s work stresses a tension imposed through the presentation of sculpture as presence and as discourse.The concern in the former is for how sculpture takes its place simultaneously as an event and literal object, in the world where it is totally present.In the latter the concern is-for how sculpture functions as representation within a discourse of objects and images in a broader context of social meaning.This already points to an important shift in the production of sculpture from that set out previously by modernist tendencies.These tendencies can be summarized as a concern for a mutual juxtaposition of shapes (i.e.material, I beams, girders, etc.) so that each element has a mutual significance to the whole, through an opposition of contrast, similarity and so on.This then constitutes the meaning of the work.By contrast, Woodrow\u2019s work is radically different.It is pictorial, rather than stressing the importance of volumes in space.Many of his works are aligned and propped against the wall, as in Picnic, or attached to it, suspended like a picture as in Portrait of a Friend and the Chrome Scissors.However, it is not only the placement of the works and their emphasis on the frontal experience that prompts the reference to the pictorial, but also the emphasis placed on the images in the work, which recombine with the material from which they were constructed to provide a different kind of reading circulating as they do around the name given to the material as object, car hood, and the image made out of it.For example a parrot and machine pistol as images constructed out of the object car hood to form the work Parrot Fashion.A certain interdependence between the object and its image makes for some of the strongest works in the show.Parrot Fashion (not illustrated) is perhaps the best example.PHILIP MONK NOTE 1.All unacknowledged quotations are from Jo-Anna Isaak\u2019s essay.Woodrow\u2019s method of fabrication is a leader to the understanding of his work.The term appropriation is often used to describe his methodology.I would prefer to offer the term \u201cmontage,\u201d which at the same time is applicable to Brenner\u2019s work.Montage is a process which includes a lexical field consisting of the terms \u201cassemble,\u201d \u201cbuild,\u201d \u201cjoin,\u201d \u201cunite,\u201d \u201cadd,\u201d \u201ccombine,\u201d \u201clink,\u201d and \u201corganize.\u201d While this takes into account the works\u2019 fabrication, it does not examine the complex relationship that is assembled through the combination of images and material.38 '\"H %.accou% lC^0- H School o| Sen a sty.0|h artis|s of British ; 'V Tucker, ; Woodroii olassi.I «toits Citations j Guettas Brenner's ccslycon.crue syn-d welded byacon-anity was \u2022 The em-s.What is M (node it Brenner imposed senceand s ior b r an event is total sculpture iviouslyby n be sum-losition ol :.) so that the «hole, and so on.k.ferent.lt is nee of vol- -theplace-the frontal «pictorial ,ges in the rom which >nt kind d ,ation iso!\" ooldP# grpeSmc'c ;-2 pr°ces5