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Readymade, Found Object, Photograph

Margaret Iversen

To cite this article:Margaret Iversen (2004) Readymade, Found Object, Photograph, ArtJournal, 63:2, 44-57

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2004.10791125

Published online: 03 Apr 2014.

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2/15

Gabriel

Orozco.

Waiting Chairs 1998.

Cibachrome.

x 20 in. 40.6 x 50.8

em

Edition of 5.Courtesy of th e artist and

Marian Goodman Gallery NewYork.

SUMM R 4


3/15

Readymade Found Object

Photograph

argaret versen

Iwould liketo thank Dawn Ades, Diarmuid

Costello, Briony Fer. Neil Cox. Stephen Melville

and James Meyer for their thoughts and encour

agement.

I Exposition surreoliste d objets Galerie Ratton,

Paris, May, 1936. Andre Breton s account of the

exhibition in Crisis of the Object has a slightly

different set of categories. American and Oceanic

objects are included under the heading of Primi

tive and his listincludes mobile objects. See

Breton, Surrealism and Painting trans. S.W. Taylor

(London: MacDonald, 1972), 275-80.

2. Andre Breton, Lighthouse of the Bride

(1935), in

Surrealism and

Painting

3, Ifrecent debates have centered on the

concept

of beauty, during the

980s

that other

form

of aesthetic judgment, the sublime, was often

invoked. See particularly [ean-Francois Lyotard,

ThePost-Modern Condition: Report on Knowledge

(1979; Manchester: Manchester University Press,

1986) and The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,

Artforum

22, no. 8 (April 1984):36 43

4. See AlexAlberro s article inthis issue for a fair

lycomprehensive bibliography of the debate.

The 1936 Surrealist Exhibition ofObjects brought together a bewildering range

of

items including natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natu

objects, found objects, perturbed objects, readymade objects, American objec

Oceanic objects, mathematical objects, and Surrealist objects. Of the nonethn

graphic 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 hav

such different legacies that they

now

arguably constitute a categorical distinc

tion. This was not so clear in the mid 1930S when Breton could define ready

mades as manufactured objects raised to the dignity

of

works of art through

the choice

of

the artist.

2

Yet,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. Wewill find that their distinctiveness hinges on the kind of su

jective relation each assumes. They turn out to embody different aspects

of

th

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 post-

conceptual or postmodern trends in the arts and crit

cism. The aesthetic, I intend to show, is

not

exhauste

by the concept of beauty.

3

Yet,at the same time, I wa

to question the wisdom of these critics opponents

w

reaffirm the anti-aesthetic and denigrate the Kantian

tradition. What the strident debates pro- and anti

beauty overlook is the continuity of certain aesthetic

attitudes and ideas that stretch from Kant through th

early avant-gardes and reemerge in contemporary art practices. Drawing out t

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 asAndyWarhol and

Ruscha, the readymade s legacy has been largely photographic. In the latter p

of this paper, I take up the less familiar theme of the found object s photograp

legacy, focusing on the work of Mary Kellyand Gabriel Orozco.

he eautiful

Every object implies a certain kind of subject. Psychoanalysis is,

of

course, de

cated to uncovering this kind

of

relation. The fetish object, for example, impli

a subject that is split along the lines

of

acknowledgement and denial

of

castra

tion. The glossy perfection of objects in fashion magazines, for another examp

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 sub

trying to keep a lid on a repressed desire for glorious muck; the kitchen is wh

called a reaction formation. Youwill notice that in each

of

these cases, the

object does not, so to speak, match the subject; rather, there is an inverted r

tionship, since the object is supposed to compensate somehow for a subjectiv

sense of deficiency.

5 t journal


4/15

5. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment trans.

Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).

245. For introductory accounts of this book. see

Michael Podro, Kant and the Aesthetic Imagina

tion, inArtand Thought. ed. D. Arnold and M.

Iversen (Oxford: Blackwells,2003). 51-70. and

EvaSchaper. Taste, Sublimityand Genius: The

Aesthetics of Nature and Art, in

The

Cambridge

Companion to Kant. ed. PaulGuyer (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1992). For good full

length studies see Henry E.Allison. Kant s Theory

of Taste: Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic

Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press. 200 I), and PaulGuyer. Kant

andthe

Claims

of

Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1979).

6. ArthurDanto is critical of Kant s universalism

in From Aesthetics to Art Criticism, fterthe

ndof Art Contemporary

Art

andthe Pale of

History

(Princeton: Princeton University Press.

1997). 94. Thierry de Duve, on the other hand.

picks out the claim to universality as the most

important feature of the judgment. Itisfor him a

sign of hope that we can share

ou r

feelingswith

others. See

Kant

afterDuchamp

(Cambridge.

Mass.:MITPress. 1996).

7.

Arthur

Schopenhauer,

The

World

asWilland

Representation

vol. I,trans. E. J. Payne (New

York: Dover. 1969). 197.

And what about the beautiful? What kind

of

subject is implied by the ob

of

aesthetic judgment? One

of

the most important defining features

of

aesth

judgment, according to Kant in

The Critique of Judgment

is 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 satisfiesa 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 sel

unlike what

we normally think

of

as subjectivity.Yet, neither can the judgme

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 i

this opacity that stimulates the free play

of

imagination and understanding. I

concert, these two faculties search for and find analogies, associations, forma

rhymes and rhythms. This activity is pleasurable in itselfbecause it satisfies th

mind s demand for coherence,

but

without subsuming the sensuous particul

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, rati

capacity and our receptivity to sensuous impressions are engaged. This activi

helps both to heal the divisions between our various faculties and, briefly, to

overcome the mind s estrangement from the world. 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 disin

terested attitude is just the assumption

of

the position

of

the subject in gener

entitled to legislate for

all?

There are two features

of

this account that I want

to draw out and examine in the light

of

contemporary art practices and critic

discourses. One is the issue

of

disinterestedness; the other is the object s cogn

tive opacity.

Kant offered very few examples

of

the kind

of

experience he was descri

ing,

but both Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer con

nected the disinterested aesthetic attitude with Dutch art. Schopenhauer s str

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, sh

an objective, that is, disinterested, view

of

the most insignificant things. The

aesthetic beholder does not contemplate this without emotion, for it graphic

describes to

him

the calm, tranquil, will-free frame

of

mind which was nece

sary for contemplating such insignificant things so objectively, considering t

so attentively, and repeating this attentionwith such thought. What is bein

described here is an art practice that tries to circumvent selfish desire, power

mastery,

possessiveness-the

whole complex

of

relations that normally gove

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 cas

disinterestedness is invoked in favor

of

an extrapersonal and intrinsically poe

domain

of

language. Stephane Mallarme, for example, wrote an appreciative

account of Edouard Manet, praising the way his

hand

became an impersona

SUMMER 4


5/15

8. Stephans Mallarme, The Impressionists and

Edouard Manet (1876), reproin Penny Florence,

Mal/arme

Manet and

Redan: Visual

and

Aural

Signs andthe Generation

of

Meaning (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1986), 12.

9. Michael Fried, Morris Louis (1971), inArt

and

Objecthood:

Essays

and

Reviews

(Chicago and

London: Chicago University Press, 1998), /27.

10. Roland Barthes,

The

Death of the Author,

in Image/MusiclText trans. Stephen Heath

(Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977). The article was

first published in Englishin

spenMagazine

S/ 6

(1966), n.p.

I I . Zeiss is the name of a

German

camera man

ufacturer, famous for the quality if its lenses.

Salvador Dali Photography: Pure Creation

of the Mind, in

Salvador Dali: The

Early

Years

(London: South BankCentre, 1994),216.

12.Mallarme, 17.

13.

Dante,After the ndof

Art 90.

14.This is essentially

what

Thierry de Duve

argues in

Kant

afterDuchamp The question isno

longer, Is it beautiful?

or

even Is it a painting?

but rather Is it art? De Duve follows a number

of Anglo-American reflections on the aesthetic

inlightof the readymade, Includingthe writings

of George Dickie,

Arthur

Danto, and Richard

Wollheim.

15.See Specification for Readyrnades in

The

Essential Writings

of

Marcel Duchamp ed.

M.

Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames

and Hudson, 1975), 32.

abstraction

The artist s personal feeling, his particular tastes are, for the

time being, absorbed, ignored. Manet was determined to paint entirely wi

out himself. Searching for a way to accomplish this feat, Manet looked to th

Dutch and Flemish artists and to an artist who had absorbed their lessons, D

Velazquez. In the early 1970s,Michael Fried invoked Mallarme s essay to cha

acterize the impersonal work

of

Morris Louis and his apparent elocutionary

disappearance. Jackson Pollock, on the other hand, is seen as locked in a str

gle between the specificity

of

urgent personal feeling and the impersonal, a

in that sense abstract, demands of painting itself.

9 Mallarrne

is also the key f

ure in Roland Barthes s The Death

of

the Author (1968): In France, Malla

was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to

substitute language itselffor the person

who

until then had been supposed t

be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language

which speaks,

not

the author

Photography s objective vision of the world was also celebrated in these te

mechanization was understood as a way of cutting through the carapace of o

habitual, interest-laden perceptions. Salvador Dali, for instance, praised the

anaesthetic stare of the extremely clear eye the lashless eye of Zeiss. And

the mechanically reproduced image can be understood as disinterested, so

might the factory-made, mass-produced

object provided

that it is denature

so as to neutralize its status as a commodity intended to satisfy desire. The ce

brated 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 displ

ment

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

Mallarrne

called

strange new beauty. I2

e dym de

Characteristically, Duchamp pushed the logic

of

disinterestedness to such an

extreme that it bites its

own

tail. Arthur Danto has made this connection, no

that Duchamp s anti-aesthetic carries with it an implicit anti-subjectivity w

is to be found at the very heart

of

Kantian aesthetics.

13

The readymade can b

seen as a limit case

of

the aesthetic its near

reductio

adabsurdum-which force

to reflect on the relation

of

art to the commodity, of the aesthetic to the appe

tive. Its effect, its legacy for subsequent art was to shift the artistic discursiv

field away from questions about aesthetic experience and toward questions

what

constitutes a work of art. 14The readymade is a limit case that throws in

sharp reliefour deeply embedded expectations of a work of art. Need

it

invo

craft? Is the signature of

the artist or the work s location in a gallery sufficien

single out an object as art?Are aesthetic qualities necessary? Does a replica h

the same value as the original work? Or does this distinction collapse in the

of

the readymade? This reductive strategy puts pressure on

our

expectations

the artist s activity by erasing every trace of personal taste or expressive gestu

Toaccomplish this, certain processes are put in train to determine the form

or choice of the object. Duchamp s

rendez-vous

is exactly

this a

prearrange

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

Although much theory and practice after Duchamp has been aggressivel

47

t

journal


6/15

16. Ibid.. 138.

17.

Pierre Cabanne,

Dialogues with

Marcel

Duchamp

trans. Ron Padgett

New

York: Da

Capo

Press. 1987).3 I

18.David joselit argues

that

Duchamp and his

followers found themselves readymade

caught inendless economy or reproduction.

Iwould add

that

they endeavored to break the

mold. See [oselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp

191 1941

(Cambridge. Mass.:MITPress. 1998).

197.

19.See. for instance.

TheDuchamp Effect

ed.

Martha Buskirk and MignonNixon (Cambridge.

Mass.:MITPress. 1996).and Thierry de Duve,

Resonances duReadymade: Duchamp entreavant-

garde

et

tradition

(Nlmes: Editions jacqueline

Charnbon

1989).

For an account of the variety

of Duchamp effects. see David Hopkins.

After

Modern

Art 1945 2 Oxford:Oxford

University Press. 2000).

20. MelBochner. SerialArt. System: Solipsism,

ArtsMagazine 41. no. 8 (Summer

1967 :

42.

See also Robert Morris. Some Notes on the

Phenomenology of Painting:The Search for the

Motivated (1970). in ContinuousProject

Altered

Daily (Cambridge. Mass.:MITPress. 1993).

71-94.

21. Roland Barthes, That Old Thing Art

, .

in TheResponsibility ofForms: Critical Essays on

Music Art andRepresentation New

York: Hill

and Wang. 1985).200.Barthes s insistence on

the asymmetry of the relation

between

the

artist/

author

and the

reborn

viewer/reader is not

shared byall

commentators

who see the art ist s

reticence mirrored inan equally desubjectivized

response to the work.

anti-aesthetic, there is plenty

of

evidence to suggest that Duchamp understoo

his own work within the tradition

of

disinterested art.

It

is well known that h

distanced himself from the anti-art antics

of

Dada and Tristan Tzara, taking up

aloof position outside the

art/anti

-art debate. In The Creative

Act,

Ducham

approvingly cited

S.Eliot: The more perfect the artist the more completely

separate in him will be the man who suffers and the man who creates. 16 Wh

discussing his early interest in mechanical drawing, he remarked, It was a so

ofloophole.You know, I ve always felt the need to escape myself.

17

The visua

indifference of mechanical drawing and the readymade was, for him, a way o

escaping the weight of taste, defined as a repetition of something already

accepted. The habitual, the tasteful, the accepted were the deadly readymade

that governed most art; Duchamp s readymades were governed by the zero

degree of aesthetics and aimed at a strange new beauty. 18

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 1960s and 1970S is now clear.19 The elocutionary disappearance of

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 ofletting the materials determine form.?? In an artic

about Pop called That OldThing Art

Barthes reprised the argument

of

The Death

of

the Author, noting that the Pop artist doesn t stand behind th

work, and he himself has no depth. He rightly concludes that what is presen

is another conception

of

the human

subject. 21

While no direct line can be

drawn between Kant s disinterestedness and Duchamp s aesthetic

of

indiffere

my argument nonetheless indicates that the so-called anti-aesthetic tradition

twentieth-century art is, in fact, a development

of

one

of

the defining feature

of

the aesthetic itself, one that became a strategy for short-circuiting the imp

tion of subjectivity.

oun

ject

One can easily see how Kant s characterization

of

aesthetic judgment as disin

ested could lead to the various desubjectivizing artistic practices I ve mention

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, on

can also readily see how the aesthetic, modified through Freud, might surviv

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 share

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 almo

every other respect it is dissimilar. The difference is attributable to Breton s po

tioning the found object in a different

space the

space

of

the unconscious.

In Surrealist Situation

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 func

of representation, so that Surrealist painting was forced to retreat to the dom

of

inner perception. This would

not

mean, however, that painting would deta

itselffrom external reality.AsBreton said, there is no such thing as spontane

48 SUMMER 4


7/15

22. Andre Breton, Surrealist Situation of the

Object (1935), inManifestoes

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,

Collopse

4 (May 1999): 60.

24. Andre Breton,

Mad

Love trans. MaryAnn

Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

/987),25.

25. Jacques Lacan,TheFour Fundamental Concepts

ofPsycho Analysis ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.

Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1977).

Translation of

Les quatre

concepts fondamentaux

de

la

psychanalyse

livreXI (Editions du seuil,

1973). This isthe published version of Lacan s

Seminar XI, delivered in 1964. Sigmund Freud,

Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Standard

Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund

Freud, vol. 18,

3-66.

26. Breton, Mad Love 3

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 th

visual residues from past experience that

turn

up in dreams. Freudian th

enabled Breton to overcome the gap between internal and external domains,

because, as Steven Harris nicely puts it, it mediated relations between extern

nature, perception

and

the unconscious.T

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

gestured toward the idea

of

a

prearranged harmonious

relation

of

mind

to

objects. For the

modern

materialist Breton, however, the relation is establishe

by external reality s effects

on

the psyche: Chance

would

be the form taken

external reality as it traces a path se fraie un

chemin

in the

human

unconscious

The object found as

if

by chance is situated at the

point

of connection betwe

external nature, perception, and the unconscious, and thus has a peculiar, elu

relation to vision. The space occupied by the found object is carved

ou t

by tr

matic experience, defined precisely as an experience that has failed to achieve

representation,

but

on which, nonetheless, one s whole existence depends. I

argue that this object calls attention to itself by creating a hole in the fabric o

normal perception. This may

sound

as

though I m

contrasting the found obj

with

the readymade in

terms

of

a subjectivity/ antisubjectivity polarity,

but

th

matter is

no t

so simple. The traumatic subject is

no t

the personal self that wa

strenuously avoided in the tradition of disinterested art. Both that tradition an

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 Mad ov (1937)

and

Jacques Lacan s 1964 sem

The

Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Analysis, in tandem

one

can see

how

they

b

circle around Freud s Beyond the

Pleasure

Principle and, also, how deeply influence

Lacan was by Breton s notion of the objet trouve or trouvaille (found object). Br

described the trouvaille as a solution found

no t

by logical means, and one that

differs completely from what is anticipated. In any case, what is delightful h

is the dissimilarity itself

which

exists between the object wished for and the

object found. 26 In his book

Compulsive

Beauty, Hal Foster has analyzed in some

detail the passages in Mad ov about the two key trouvailles-a

wooden

spoon a

a metal mask; he demonstrates clearly that they do

no t

represent simple wish

fulfillments, but are laced with desire and death. He suggests that Breton s co

ception of the found object anticipates Lacan s

objet

petit the lost object wh

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.

I think, however, that Lacan s elusive object is actually modeled on Breto

found

object. The example

of

the marvelous slipper-spoon is

most

telling. Br

wanted

Alberto Giacometti to make

him

a literal, material instantiation of the

perplexing phrase Cinderella-ashtray

Cendrillon-cendrier , but

it was

no t

forthcomi

On a visit to a Paris flea market

with

the sculptor, Breton lit

on

a curious

woo

spoon

with a little

boot

carved

under

its handle

and

carried it off. Only

when

got the object

home

did it transform itself into the object of his desire: It w

clearly changing right

under

my eyes. From the side, at a certain height, the

wood spoon coming

ou t

of its handle, took on,

with

the help of the curvatu

of

the handle, the aspect

of

a heel

and

the

whole

object presented the silhou

of a slipper

on

tiptoe like those

of

dancers.T

ar t

journal


8/15

Man Ray.From a little

shoe that was

part

of it

; 1934. Black-and-white

photograph published in

Andre Breton

Mad ove

2004

Man Ray

Trustl

ADAGP Paris and DACS

London.

29. Ibid., 36.

30. Lacan,

TheFour

Fundamental Concepts

84

31. Jacques Lacan,

The

Psychoses

Seminar Book

III 1955-56, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller

New

York

and London: Routledge, 1993), 179.

32. Malcolm Bowie,

Lacon

(London: Fontana,

1991), 168.

33. Roland Barthes, Comera Lucida: Reffections on

Photography (1980), trans. Richard

Howard New

York: Hilland Wang, 1981), 87. See my

What

Is

a Photograph? in

Art

History 17. no. 3 (Septem

be r

1994): 450--63.

Likethe anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein s painting The Ambassadors wh

resolves into a skull from the side, at a certain height, the opaque, incompre

sible spoon is suddenly transformed into the lustrous lost object par excellenc

Cinderella s glass slipper. It is just what, in our folklore, takes on the meaning

the lost object.

2 9

If the reflection in the mirror is the prototype

of

all images

of

ego, then this contradictory, ungra

pable, fleeting object is the prototy

for images

of

the castrated, barred

split, in short, anamorphic subject

This subject, called punningly by

Lacanlesujet troue (the subject full

of holes), uses an objet trouve (a fou

object) to figure both the hole and

the bit that s missing.

3

The slipper

spoon

of

love has its counterpart,

mask

of

death, found by Giacomet

on the same occasion and which,

according to Breton, enabled him

finish his sculpture L Objet invisible

If, as I argue, Lacan formulated his idea

of

the object of desire with Breto

trouvaille

in mind, then he must also have borrowed the Surrealist notion

of

the

encounter for his conception ofJa rencontre monquee (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

imaginar

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,

Th

Psychoses:

There is, in effect, something radically unassimilable to the signifier

It s quite Simply the subject s singular existence.

3

The mark of the subject s s

gularity is objet petit a.Yet,since objet petit a cannot become an object of consciou

ness and is unspecularizable, it is not susceptible to the criticism that it revive

a nostalgia for lost immediacy or presence. Treading carefully,Malcolm Bowie

remarks that, with the introduction

of objet petit

a, Lacan allowed the ghost

of

referentiality to regain admission to his scheme.

32

A ghost

of

referentialiy is exactly what Barthes invoked in his Camera Lucid

where he stressed the greater importance for photography

of

chemistry rathe

than the camera obscura:

i t

is light-sensitive paper that gives the photograph

essential nature as a that-has-been. Barthes emphasized the photograph s in

mate connectionwith 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. AsI ha

argued elsewhere, Barthes formulated his idea

of

the subject s relation to pho

raphy

with

one

hand

in the pages

of

Lacan s Four Fundamental Concepts.v He argu

for instance, that the defining characteristic

of

photography is its attachment

SU R 4


9/15

Mary elly

Post Portum

Document, Introduction

1973.Detail. Perspex units,

white card, wool vests,pen-

cil, and ink.Four units, ea.

8

x

lOin. 20 x 25.5 em .

Collection of Eileen and

Peter Norton. Courtesy of

the artist.

34. lbid., 4.

35.

Ibid.,

75.

36. Mary Kelly Excavating Post-Partum

Document

interviewwith JuliCarson, inMary

Kelly: Rereading

Post-Partum

Document

(Vienna:

Generali Foundation, 1998), 186.

7Minotaure 3/ 4

December

1933): 68

38. See my Visualizingthe Unconscious: Mary

Kelly s Installations, inMary

Kelly

(London:

Phaidon, 1997), 32--85.

the

absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stup

the This

in short,

what

Lacan calls ruche the Occasion, the Encounter, the

Real, in its indefatigable expression. >

ruche

is experienced by the subject as

painful intrusion, as a trauma-an encounter with a real beyond the pleasur

principle. In the first part of

Camera Lucida

the real is located in a detail, a punc

also called by him petite tache (little mark or sta

reference to Lacan s blind spot in the ortho

perceptual field also called the stain and defined

that

which

always escapes from the grasp of th

form of vision that is satisfied with

itselfin

ima

ing itself as consciousness.l Y For Barthes, photo

raphy, like the found object, has a privileged rel

t ion to this blind spot, this hole, this traumatic

If this is so,

then photography is a fascinatingly

ambivalent medium: not only readymade/simu

lacral,

but

also traumaticlreal.

ry elly

I

now want

to focus my discussions

of

the foun

object, photography, and aesthetics beyond the

pleasure principle on the work of two contemp

rary artists. One artist whose work has always b

a touchstone for my thinking is Mary

Kelly.

In a

recent interview, Kellyspoke about

how

she rega

her

installation

Post-Partum Document

as polemical

related to the work

of

British Conceptual artists

whose

interrogation of the object was

not

follo

up by an interrogation of the subject.

36

The Intro

tion

to

Document

1973, takes the form of tiny bab

vests crossed, indeed, crossed out, by the lines

Lacan s diagram of intersubjectivity. Although th

vests are readymade and arranged serially, their

psychic value and relation to loss is obvious, making

them more

akin to fou

objects. The panels of

Corpus

Part I of Interim have the same significance. In

Interim middle age is conceived as a moment ofloss in relation to one s sense

identity as a woman.The posed articles of clothing refer to the neuropatholo

Jean Martin Charcot s famous photographs of hysterics, of great importance

Surrealist circles,

but formally they resemble the photograph in Breton s Nadj

of

a bronze paperweight in the form

of

a woman s glove.This isolated article

clothing served as a model

of

the image panels for

Corpus.

However, the Surre

images that relate formally most closely to the

Corpus

panels are Brassai s stran

close-up photographs of

Sculptures involontaires.

37These involuntary sculptures w

photographed on glass and subjected to a raking light so that they seem to h

just above the ground, casting a shadow. Kelly

produced

a similar effect by u

semitransparent laminated

photo

positives applied to Perspex panels so as to

emphasize these objects peculiar relation to

visibility-

Kelly gives us a clue about what she found valuable in these Surrealist

5 art journal


10/15

SU R 4


11/15

Brassa i.

Sculpture involontoire

billet

d outobus

rou/e 1932

Black-and-white photograph.

Estate Brassa

, R.M.N.

Anonymous. Photograph of

bronze

glove belonging

to

a

woman,

1928. Published

with

caption

Gant

de

femme

aussi . in Andre Breton,

Nodjo

65.

opposite:

Mary Kelly.

Interim Port I:

Corpus, 1984-85.Laminated

photo positive, silkscreen, and

acrylic on Plexiglas.Thirty

panels, ea . 35 x 48 in. ( 90 x

122.5

em ,

Courtesy

of

Postmasters Gallery,

New

York.

Courtesy

of

th e artist.

5 3 ar t ournal


12/15

39. Mary

Kelly

Desiring Images/Imaging Desire,

in

Imaging Desire

(Cambridge Mass.:MITPress,

1996), 122.

40. Breton, Surrealist Situation of the Object,

7

41. Gabriel Orozco, Photogravity (Philadelphia:

PhiladelphiaMuseum of Art, 1999).

42. David Joselit describes

Orozco s

work as

involvingan encounterwith the readymade, blur

ringthe distinction Iwish to preserve between

rendezvous and encounter. Gabriel Orozco,

Artforum39, no. I (September 2000): 173.

43. Orozco, S4.

44. Ibid.,8.

45. Ibid.,

II .

46. Interview with Carl Andre. See LucyLippard,

SixYears TheDematerialization of

Art

trom 9

to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1997),40. See also Alex Potts,

The

Sculptural

Imagination Figurative Modernist Minimalist (New

Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 2000), 312ff.

47. Orozco, 36.

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 th

subject, points linked, not to a surface,

bu t

to a place-the unconscious-and

not by means of light,

bu t

by the laws of primary process. These filmy item

of clothing are adrif t in the realm of lost objects, cut off from symbolically ar

ulated reality.This is consistent with Breton s call for artists to use real objects

their work. While he encouraged poets and painters to incorporate the preci

sion of sensible forms, he also required that these objects be detached from

domain of perception-consciousness, making

them

like the visual residues

turn up in dreams.t? Carefully choosing her materials and formal devices, Ke

positions her objects in an ambiguous space between external nature, percep

tion, and the unconscious.

abriel rozco

There is a wonderful catalogue of an exhibition of Gabriel Orozco s work hel

at the Philadelphia Museum ofArt in 1999.4 Reproduced in the volume, calle

Photogravity

are fragments

of

pages

of

the artist s notebooks. All very

Green

Box y

may

say

and Duchamp is undoubtedly an important figure for

Orozco.f

But

some of his work and notes point in another direction. A fragmentary note

reads: Photography as a hole. 43 Elsewhere in the notes,

one

can find jotting

that help to explicate this puzzling phrase. It

would

seem to have some relatio

to his idea

of

the expectant (or waiting) object. 44This object is the inverse

sculpture,

which

traditionally has its center of gravity its base.What would

happen, Orozco asks, if sculpture were

opened

up and we moved inside it?Th

the relation

would

be inverted; the spectator

would

become the object of sigh

the vanishing point.t-This idea is reminiscent of Lacan s inverted perspective

diagram in The Four Fundamental Concepts of

Psycho Analysis.

But Orozco had to acco

plish this inversion in space, in material form. On the same page is a sketch fo

just such a projected nonsculpture. A slice of clay is removed from the base of

traditionally conceived sculpture. The sculpture is

thrown

away and the slice o

clay spread out on the

ground

and flipped over so we can see the

imprint

of t

opened-out, obliterated vanishing point.We are not far from CarlAndre s floo

pieces and his gnomic

remark

A thing is a hole in a th ing it is not,

which

points toward an idea

of

sculpture as a rupture in the

continuum of

space. F

the most part, Orozco s notes aren t dated,

bu t

we can be pretty sure this is a

stab at what was to become Yielding Stone

1992,

a ball of plasticine that has bee

rolled

through

the street, picking up marks and debris. Black Kites (1997) also

seems to play on a collapse of Renaissance perspective, whose very emblem i

the checkerboard-tiled pavement, now anamorphically stretched and distorte

around a death s head. If my allusion to Lacan in the context

of

Orozco s wor

seems farfetched, there is another page in the notebook where Orozco has jo

down

a quotation from

Slavoj

Zizek s

Looking

wry Zizek is largely responsib

for the mediation to a

wider

audience

of

Lacan s later work,

where

he develo

the idea of the real as a register

of

the psychic reality set in relation to the im

nary and the symbolic. The Zizek citation follows remarks on Kazimir Malevi

Black Square

(1915).

SUMMER 4


13/15

Gabriel Orozco.

iel ing

Stone. 1992. Plasticine and

dust. 19 in. diam. 48.5 em

132.2 Ibs 60 kg . Collection

Walker Art Center. Min-

neapolis.Courtesy of

t

artist and MarianGoodman

Gallery.

New

York.

48. SlavojZizek,

Looking

wry An

Introduction

to

jacques

Lacan

through Popular

Culture (Cambridge.

Mass.. and London: Verso. 1991), 19.

The reality (white background surface, the liberated nothingness: th

open space in which

nothingness can appear) obtains its consistency on

by means of the black hole in its center, (the Lacanian

s

Ding the Thi

that gives body to the substance of enjoyment) i.e., by the exclusion of

Real, by the change of the status of the Real into that

of

a central lack.48

IfKellyshows us the object s proximity to that central lack, then Orozco

wants to show us the unrepresentable threshold itself: the next-to-nothing, t

ripple in water, the wake

of

an action, as he puts it. In short, photography

hole. See, for example, Orozco s photograph of a found Zen drawing done w

rain water for ink and bicycle wheels for a brush, Extension ofReflection

1992.

H

Breath

on

Piano 1993,

shows a smoky patch of condensation on the cool black

face of the piano. The

Waiting

Chairs

1998,

are expectant objects, parexcellence T

photographs present objects on the threshold of visibility or invoke an absenc

past moment in time. In this way,Orozco heightens photography s that-has-b

55

art journal


14/15

SU R 4


15/15

Gabriel Orozco Extension

of

Reflection 1992. C-print. 16 x

20 in. 40.6 x 50.8 em Edition

of 5.

ourtesy

of the artist

and MarianGoodman Gallery

New

York.

Gabriel

Orozco

Breath on

iano

1993. C-print. 16

x

20 in.

40.6 x 50.8 ern), Edition of 5.

ourtesy

of

the

artist and

MarianGoodman Gallery

New

York.

49. SlavojZizek, Burningthe Bridges. in

he

Zizek

Reader ed. ElizabethWright and Edmond

Wright (Oxford: lackwells 1999). ix.

character, but also generalizes it to include the whole texture of

our

experienc

the world, punctuated as it iswith holes leading down to the unconscious.

We saw that the modernist tradition

of

disinterested art displaced subjec

ity in favor

of

the medium; the effect

of

Duchamp s (postmodern?) intervent

was to expand the idea

of

medium to include the whole institution

of

art. Th

desubjectivizing strategy of the readymade, with its systematic work

of

negat

and testing

of

the limits

of

what counts as art, has sustained art practice for m

of

the last century and continues to do so.Yetthe dominance

of

the Duchamp

effect may have blinded us to the legacy

of

the found object, which is less vis

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 itselfto w

issues

of

subjectivity and SOciality loss and memory, love and death. AsZizek

so pithily

put

t with regard to cultural theory: The celebrated postmodern

displacement

of

subjectivity rather exhibits an unreadiness to come to term

with the truly traumatic core of the modern subject. 49My 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.

Margaret Iversen is Professor of Art History. University of Essex, England.She isthe

author

of

A ois R

Art History and Theory and ary Kelly (with Douglas Crimp and Homi Bhabha). She also edited (WithD

Arnold) ArtandThought

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