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Art Journal
ISSN: 0004-3249 (Print) 2325-5307 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcaj20
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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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.
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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
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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
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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
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7/26/2019 Readymade Found Object Photograph.pdf
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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).
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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
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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