The object of art¹

Romildo do Rêgo Barros²

romildorbarros@terra.com.br

Abstract: Considering the object of art as one that has no useful purpose, but produces something extra, the author compares art and psychoanalysis. Each of them, in its own way, intends to find a destiny to something extra that causes jouissance but cannot be confined to shapes or words. He states that psychoanalysis meets art at the point where the usefulness of objects is no longer immediate and requires symbolic mediation.
Key words: Art; Psychoanalysis; object; ethics.

Resumen: Considerando al objeto de arte como algo que no tiene utilidad pero que sin embargo produce algo extra, el autor compara el arte y el psicoanálisis. Dice que a su propio modo, cada uno intenta encontrar un destino para aquello que el goce produce y que no puede ser confinado a formas o palabras. Afirma también que el psicoanálisis se encuentra con el arte allí donde la utilidad de los objetos no es inmediata sino que requiere de una mediación simbólica.
Palabras Claves: arte; psicoanálisis; objeto; ética.

You doubtlessly know the story of Apelles, a famous painter of antiquity who, hidden behind a curtain one day, heard a shoemaker commenting on the sandals that he had painted. Apelles accepted the criticism and changed the sandals. The next day, the same shoemaker criticized the shape of the leg. The artist then responded with a phrase that became famous: ne sutor ultra crepidam, "Let the shoemaker venture no further” This phrase, doubtlessly slightly cruel might even be applied to me tonight . It does not mean that a shoemaker cannot have an opinion about a work of art.

However, when speaking of matters different from professional specialization, he would have to use other criteria: a shoemaker, as a shoemaker, can only speak of footwear. Objects, as you well know, are generally classified according to their usefulness. They serve some purpose. A polygraph, for example, serves for writing. A polygraph is a condition to our writing – not its cause, which is within us, but an instrument. A polygraph does not foresee the inspiration for the text it writes, nor does it need to know what it will write (unless someone like Edgar Alan Poe tells us the story of a polygraph who writes by itself), but this does not prevent it from leaving a mark on the surface of the paper, which we interpret as writing. Putting it very briefly, objects serve some body need , a subject’s body – an object always presumes a subject. Our clothes serve to shelter our bodies; shoes protect us from the hardness of the floor; polygraphs serve us for writing etc. That is what we think, when we do not think much.

Usefulness is thus one of the conditions of the encounter between a body and an object. Many times, usefulness even determines the shape of the object. Through its design, for example, we can make its shape compatible with its usefulness. Design, as everyone knows, is not restricted to that, but that is also part of it; that is: a way of joining the shape an object must have with its practical finality.

In principle, a shoe must have a shape opposite to that of the foot, in such a way that it can serve as a container for the foot, which is then contained. A shod foot is thus one unit made up of a vessel and its contents. This can give us the impression that there is a complementarity between bodies and the objects attached to bodies. Effectively, it seems possible to think in terms of complementarity if we stick to usefulness. Content can only be seen as content if it has a container with its own formal characteristics. If we have a size-ten foot, we cannot wear a size-nine shoe. The pain we feel indicates that there is difference or distance between the contents and the container. Pain is the sensitive aspect of this gap. As Freud used to say, referring to the anguish, it is a sign. In other words, pain shows us that there is something besides the encounter between body and object. There is something else. We are no longer in the territory of complementary relationships. We are closer to the plane of supplements. Pain is a sign of the supplementary character of the meeting of body and object. If we previously had a foot and a shoe, we now also have pain that does not properly belong to the foot or the shoe. However, not only is pain situated in the territory of the supplement, but also pleasure – above all certain pleasures that get away from the body’s immediate needs and that we cannot easily consider functional. We can think of sexual pleasure, which has no precise object, and of the so-called aesthetic pleasure that is expected from our encounters with that which is beautiful. That which exceeds the complement equally exceeds the function, need and usefulness.

Something plus …

As an example, let us consider a famous Van Gogh painting that is known to all and that was commented on by various thinkers and theoreticians, as for example Heidegger in an article entitled “The origin of the work of art”. The painting represents a rural woman’s pair of shoes. They are used shoes that evidence signs of wear; that is, they show us that there is a subject, who does not appear in the painting, who wore or is still wearing them. Van Gogh’s painting is situated in an interval between moments of using the shoes. Thus, there is an object and a subject; at least supposedly, usefulness unites the shoes and the rural woman. We can also believe that the sizes of the shoes and of the rural woman’s feet agree. However, what happens, what transformation occurs, when this very common object is represented in a Van Gogh painting? This is the question I would like to place before you tonight. We could ask the same question regarding the pipe that Magritte painted in 1929, writing beneath it, “this is not a pipe”. Effectively, the artist is right in saying that it is not a pipe because one cannot smoke a painting. As faithful as the reproduction may be, the painting is still unable to give the image the utility that the reproduced object itself has. Something has changed between the object that served as a model for the work of art and the work itself. In this scene, something is added or, contrarily, something is subtracted. Finally, the same question can be posed ever since Andy Warhol, one of the twentieth century’s most well known American artists, created a series of works in the 70s representing an object that could not be more common: the Campbell’s soup can.

The artist’s soup cans are faithful reproductions of the cans found in supermarkets, which one buys almost without thinking. Furthermore, since Warhol painted objects in series (he has done the same with photos of Jacqueline Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe etc.), his work also reproduces a fundamental aspect of contemporary consumer objects; that is, they are always seen in series, never individually. A can of Campbell’s soup is always one of the millions of soup cans that feed the millions of persons that do not need a face, a story or singular experiences. It suffices that they have the habit of gathering cans in supermarkets – and, supposedly, paying for them at the exit. Warhol not only isolated an object from its group – purely ideal –, from the things of this world, but also intended to give a singular character to that which is least singular; that is, the grouping of consumer objects that are manufactured, displayed and consumed in series, day after day, person after person, can after can. As possibly always occurs in art, Warhol confronts us with a paradox: as perfect as it may be, the reproduction, imitation or copy, as Aristotle said in his Poetics, includes something that surpasses the shape, need and function, but we do not know exactly what this something is. Throughout the history of art, creators always sought to transmit this certain something, sometimes approaching the shape more, as Andy Warhol and many others did, sometimes keeping their distance, as the impressionists did in a more radical way, those artists that through their works broke away from the shape of mundane things. This something plus , which we do not know very well what it is, seems to be what characterizes art objects in the sense that art exhibits that which cannot be contained by a shape or explained entirely. As Walter Benjamin wrote in 1935, “an element is missing in even the most perfect reproduction: the hic et nunc of the work of art, its unique existence […]. It is in this unique existence, and only in it, that the history of art develops” [1]. Benjamin called this unique element of the work of art its “aura”; that is, “the unique appearance of a distant thing, as near as it may be” [2]. Benjamin believed that this aura would disappear with the emergent possibility of the technical reproduction of art works, mainly in movies and photography, but it is not very certain that this is occurring. Something can take the place of the traditional aura and sustain the uniqueness of contemporary art works.

Psychoanalysis and art

I think psychoanalysis and art, each in its own way, have a common intent to give a destiny to this something extra that, although it cannot be confined to shapes or words, is nonetheless essential; that is, it is the cause of all that remains of that which we are able to say in words or express formally. However, how can we situate this something else without falling into the dominion of religion, which precisely situates sublime objects that, by supposition, would be beyond human? How can one identify as human, or essentially human, that which goes beyond words? Benjamin used to say that that which we call an art object, before expressing beauty, historically began as an instrument of worship, in the beginning magic, and soon after, religious. Only later, with the depletion of this ritual function, art objects became display objects, things to be seen. We might think that, as they became display objects, art objects lost – at least in part – their magic efficacy and went on to represent something instead of being something. It seems to me that this is where psychoanalysis meets art, where the usefulness of objects is no longer immediate and requires symbolic mediation. Many artistic works and perspectives, particularly in the field of plastic arts, have emerged in recent times, which seem to remove art from the strict field of beauty. It seems important to me to note that this tendency of leaving Beauty impels art toward Ethics, in the sense that the act and gesture of the artist are included in the definition itself of his art, and goes on to be part of the work itself. We can attempt to enumerate some of these tendencies: Instead of searching for beauty, for “the splendor of form” as St. Thomas Aquinas used to say, many works redeem the dimension of the waste. This deals not with raising the waste upward – this “upward” forcibly has a religious inspiration –, but more precisely with revealing dignity proper to the waste as waste. I am thinking of someone like Franz Krajberg, who creates his art using natural waste from Brazil’s Amazon, such as dead roots and fallen trees. Likewise, I think of Andy Warhol, who with his soup cans removed the sacred distance that used to separate objects considered artistic from the common objects that industry offers to the masses. This obligates psychoanalysts to define better what they mean by sublimation. As Lacan teaches us, it is not the domestication of art, aimed at achieving the acceptance of the average public opinion, but the extraction of a certain essence of being that is inaccessible outside of the arts – a new ordinance for the body, which in some cases offers itself as an object or as artistic support, dissolving the separation between the body and objects that has guided us for many centuries. I am not referring to mutilating the body as a basis for creating, or to exposing its desires – this would perhaps require a separate discussion. Instead, I simply think, for example, of a work that is a vessel for the body; that is, a work that, in order to be seen, needs the spectator to go within himself, from whence he can only watch it. During its short permanence, each body that goes within itself is part of the work. And finally, a crisis or a certain declination of authorship, which is manifested not only by way of collective creation, but also in cases in which, as Benjamin used to say regarding Greek statues, the work does not have eternity as its goal – that is, ephemeral works whose authorship will disappear together with the works. To a psychoanalyst, art is a privileged field of the subject-object encounter in the sense of a convergence between the work and its creator – not exactly by way of the subject’s imaginary identification with its objects, but because the subject can find in the object the exteriority that has always been its own. Precisely at this point, there is an encounter between the consequences of the practice of psychoanalysis and the effects of creation.

Translation by Heloisa Caldas.

¹Conference at the MAC - Miami Art Central, October 10, 2006, organized by NEL – Miami.
²Analyst Member (AME) of the Escola Brasileira de Psicanálise – EBP.