Silent Screams
Sooner or later in history, it is time for every historical constellation to be defined in one term. This also applies to the constellation of art, femininity and language, for instance. There is no doubt that art, throughout the centuries, from cave paintings to nude pictures in classic western painting has always been linked to certain forms of femininity. And, no doubt, women were brought up as subjects of art - and as the subjects of femininity of art itself - precisely when the first female artists appeared on the scene (provided we do as if there had been no female artists before, even at the very beginning already). It was the appearance of psychoanalysis, however, which caused the linkage between femininity and language - and, indirectly, the linkage of both of them to art - to become a central aspect of modern culture.
Of course, the subject of femininity was not Freud's invention. He rather adopted it from Charcot who, in the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, staged a living theatre of female hysteria - where the woman, however, was spotlighted as an object of research: woman as both the object and the justification of a new science - or rather as the abyss of this new science. For Charcot's studies already constituted a field - rather a Bermuda triangle - which later on would engulf Freud and Lacan, Lacan even claiming in his famous saying that the woman simply does not exist: La femme n'existe pas.
It does not make a difference if this sentence means the vanishing of women in general or the vanishing of the individual woman; it does not matter if you see the woman vanish as a generic being or this individual woman as a single creature - Lacan's words define a crisis of the signs of femininity which was possibly triggered by Charcot (you could as well blame this on German romanticism including Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of Femininity of 1800) and came to a head with Freud before it was articulated by contemporary art. Articulation - this inconspicuous word is more important than it might seem at first sight because the secret of this Bermuda triangle is not a secret in the classical sense. It does not follow the logic of something concealed, of darkness, of withdrawal of light.
Since Charcot, the problem of femininity so clearly illuminated by contemporary art has existed in certain articulations, in the positivity of signs - which nobody knew how to interpret, however. Post-psychoanalytic thinking - let's say, from Benjamin to Derrida to Zizek - assigned to these enigmatic signs the position of a void within the scientific civilisation. This is how the feminine could become the challenge and investigation of culture as a whole; the articulations of the woman and the signs of the feminine were turned into a question without answer in modern culture. At the latest, it was Freud's Civilization and its Discontents published in 1930 which made us aware that this discontent has obvious female features.
Since the cultural abysses began to be defined in feminine terms - which, as a by-product, brought about gender theory - the subject of female art has enjoyed immense attention. This interest is not even belittled by the fact that female art regularly failed to come up to the expectations placed on it. Just the opposite: whoever states that "female art" - provided that there is such a thing as female art at all - keeps putting questions instead of answering them will ensure rather that the tension stays alive than that the interest will subside. Nothing can be mystified as easily as the mysterious and enigmatic the feminine has continuously been identified with.
The unbearable euphoria with regard to the enigmatic is also the reason why the functioning of "female art" can follow a serial principle of eternal postponement: female art permanently making a riddle out of itself instead of unraveling itself, any recognition of the woman being represented as a failure to recognize her, there is a long list of female artists who keep refusing to unravel themselves. Certainly, they have profited more from the "sexuality dispositive" (Michel Foucault) than anybody else, no matter if psychoanalysis was heir to Christian confession practices or not.
Since this dispositive began to rule, since psychoanalysis put the silent screams and difficult dreams on the couch and made them talk, the screams and dreams have appeared to open up the access to the inmost centre, even to the secret mystery of culture as a whole. In fact, the dreams and confessions of women were the first objects of Freud's talking cure because this enigmatic unconsciousness, having expressing itself in the hysteric convulsions of Charcot's theatre and later on the form of Freud's strange case histories, was the invention of a higher or subordinate authority which spoke more truly and more honestly than all words.
The unconscious being female and having shown a clearly feminine codification from the very beginning, whoever puts his ear to the unconscious place par excellence, "the mussel" - just like the protagonist in Georges Bataille's Madame Edwarda of 1942 does - believes that he listens to a truer language. The medium of the woman, after centuries which failed to bring male thinking closer to the truth, was introduced as an interface between male thinking and the truth, as a relay of truth closely related to the body: the mouth of female artists also speaks the truth - there is a desire for truth and an economy of its fictions which also controls the contemporary interest in female art, no matter if it has ever fulfilled this desire or not. In fact, even those two or three generations of female artists who devoted themselves to the deconstruction of these myths of femininity profit from their post-psychoanalytic business.
But, actually, what sort of business is it all about if you talk about silent screams, difficult dreams? The answer - it's about the business of Dream Interpretation - will occur to you as soon as you do not only turn to the silent screams of the unconscious but also deal with the difficult dreams. The first milestone of the academic unraveling of femininity, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams of 1899, brought to light strange dreams which not only paved the way for psychoanalysis; these dreams also laid the foundation of surrealism for a fundamentally female art (which, quite surprisingly, could as well be produced by men) - for a female art about which you are forced to talk exclusively in terms of dreams since surrealist arts critique.
It was in his interpretation of Wilhelm Jensen's short novel Gradiva of 1903 that Freud demonstrated for the first time how the interpretation of art coincides with the interpretation of dreams. The title does not stand so much for the protagonist of the narrative hides, a bone dry scientist, but rather for his suppressed childhood sweetheart who appears to him in the form of a hallucinated Roman goddess. For his interpretation, Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva published in 1907, Freud made use of narrated fragments of dreams for the first time - and thus created the basis for the new business of psychoanalytic interpretation of literature. And, at the same time, the business of an art which is closer to the difficult dream than to a reality as complicated as a dream. In fact, the female dreams which launched psychoanalysis or made it get up from the couch were complicated not only because they mostly had a violently emotional, if not sexual content. These were difficult dreams also because they were not easy to understand - that's why Gradiva also advanced to the icon of numerous surrealist artists, who, like André Breton did in 1935, decorated their art galleries with the name Gradiva and subsequently have artists like Marcel Duchamp, for example, fit out these galleries afterwards. And this business is still flourishing today.
As a matter of fact, the Gradiva business is flourishing not so much in theory than it is flourishing in arts. In contrast to the golden age of poststructuralism, when in Paris (with Kristeva and Barthes, Deleuze and Derrida, Cixous and Irigaray) the monthly output in new ways of feminine thinking exceeded the number of new fashion designs in the spring couture collection, the theory has in the meantime assumed a certain ascetic reserve, with the only exception maybe of Slavoj Zizek's neolacanianism. Quite some time has elapsed now since Gilles Deleuze issued his slogan devenir femme. Today, the Gradiva business is carried on by more or less discreet ladies who implement their silent screams, difficult dreams in works of art - or who cleverly use the femininity dispositive to keep producing new elements of a never-ending long runner starring female leading actors.
The grande dame of this art, who with superior ease puts the construction and deconstruction of femininity side by side, is, of course, Louise Bourgeois (* 1911). The inscrutable power of her a-logical drawings and graphics comes from worlds of memory and autobiography and also from dream and dream associations. Particularly Bourgeois' drawings insist on a bewildering ambiguity between fiction and reality, mythos and logos, association and deconstruction. The structures often consisting of a few lines only grow rampant into a submarine splendour and abundance of forms which are as impossible to reduce to any logical or meaningful formula as the dreams. Bourgeois radically stretching out her femininity (or its invented tentacles) to the outside, the art of drawing has become more and more female - devenir femme - and this does not only apply to drawings made by women.
Though Sophie Calle (* 1953) works with wholly different media than Bourgeois does, she articulates similar issues: her series Les Recits Autobiographiques frankly plays with the borderline between a narrative which is not necessarily wrong and a photographic reality which may as well be an invention. Calle photographs dreams and invents her own realities - she divests her inner life and appropriates female clichés. In doing so, she keeps quiet about how serious this game actually is: a piece such as Dream Wedding (2000) never lets you know if Calle makes fun of the cliché of a woman addicted to the idea of getting married or if she likes herself in everybody's dreams. Maybe she doesn't even know herself. The one thing which is sure is that the own figure changes into the projection pattern of a game between dream and reality which Calle plays with her spectators.
In Maria Marshall's (* 1966) video Pinocchio (2003), the female universe of images turns into a resplendent movie centering upon an ambiguous female figure. On the one hand, the dreamy and kitschy ambience with candlelight and plastic mysticism evokes a number of parareligious dreams dreamt by young girls. On the other hand, there is nothing more groundless than the patched-up home-made-mystic in the remote trailer. The sign of this trashy unworldlyness, of course, is the small baby doll in the arms of the would-be mother. The little monster in the arms of a mother - who is as monstrous as the monster - reveals itself as a component of a crazy private mysticism which possibly doesn't differ at all from the modern womens' glamorous world of lies.
Also Susan Turcot (* 1966) is connected with her female figures by a mystical bond. In her works, however, the portraits show not a glamorous but rather a gloomy and obsessive shade. And Turcot does not take her preferred female figures to an unworldly and remote mobile home but to the world of history. As if Turcot wished to unveil the manic night side of Marshall's colourful childhood bliss, she devotes her series of drawings to individual figures of women such as, e.g., Mechthild von Magdeburg in Hotel Magdeburg. Lady Love (1998). By means of the keyword Lady Love, Turcot links the secret of the female mystic to the mystery of the female artist. This also happens in her recent drawings of the series Divided Subjects (2003). Here, the artist presents herself as a sort of satellite receiver for extraterrestrial signals, as an antenna for a state of emergency, which, of course, is codified in female terms. Shortly before turning into scripture, Turcot's lines make a pause, however, as if not to let out the mystical secret of femininity - and thus devastating their intimacy rather then relinquishing it. This adds, of course, to the attractivity of this secret.
In her work Fake Female Artist's Life (2003), Mathilde ter Heijne (* 1969) also tells us that this bottomless world between myth and reality is identical with the artist's world. This is the world where the projections of femininity may be decoded better than anywhere else. The modern female artist being a projection figure par excellence, ter Heijne makes three invented puppets of female artists appear on stage in characteristic outfit. The words she puts into the mouths of her self-portraits do not only tell something about the sociology of how role concepts of female artists change in the course of decades; these words do not only report the psychology of a female artist who seems to identify with her suicidal and depressive figures. In the first place, her fake female artists make a statement about the economy of fictions the female artist has been associated with in the past and still is associated with today.
Text: Knut Ebeling
Translation from German into English: Andreas Bredenfeld
Of course, the subject of femininity was not Freud's invention. He rather adopted it from Charcot who, in the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, staged a living theatre of female hysteria - where the woman, however, was spotlighted as an object of research: woman as both the object and the justification of a new science - or rather as the abyss of this new science. For Charcot's studies already constituted a field - rather a Bermuda triangle - which later on would engulf Freud and Lacan, Lacan even claiming in his famous saying that the woman simply does not exist: La femme n'existe pas.
It does not make a difference if this sentence means the vanishing of women in general or the vanishing of the individual woman; it does not matter if you see the woman vanish as a generic being or this individual woman as a single creature - Lacan's words define a crisis of the signs of femininity which was possibly triggered by Charcot (you could as well blame this on German romanticism including Friedrich Schlegel's Theory of Femininity of 1800) and came to a head with Freud before it was articulated by contemporary art. Articulation - this inconspicuous word is more important than it might seem at first sight because the secret of this Bermuda triangle is not a secret in the classical sense. It does not follow the logic of something concealed, of darkness, of withdrawal of light.
Since Charcot, the problem of femininity so clearly illuminated by contemporary art has existed in certain articulations, in the positivity of signs - which nobody knew how to interpret, however. Post-psychoanalytic thinking - let's say, from Benjamin to Derrida to Zizek - assigned to these enigmatic signs the position of a void within the scientific civilisation. This is how the feminine could become the challenge and investigation of culture as a whole; the articulations of the woman and the signs of the feminine were turned into a question without answer in modern culture. At the latest, it was Freud's Civilization and its Discontents published in 1930 which made us aware that this discontent has obvious female features.
Since the cultural abysses began to be defined in feminine terms - which, as a by-product, brought about gender theory - the subject of female art has enjoyed immense attention. This interest is not even belittled by the fact that female art regularly failed to come up to the expectations placed on it. Just the opposite: whoever states that "female art" - provided that there is such a thing as female art at all - keeps putting questions instead of answering them will ensure rather that the tension stays alive than that the interest will subside. Nothing can be mystified as easily as the mysterious and enigmatic the feminine has continuously been identified with.
The unbearable euphoria with regard to the enigmatic is also the reason why the functioning of "female art" can follow a serial principle of eternal postponement: female art permanently making a riddle out of itself instead of unraveling itself, any recognition of the woman being represented as a failure to recognize her, there is a long list of female artists who keep refusing to unravel themselves. Certainly, they have profited more from the "sexuality dispositive" (Michel Foucault) than anybody else, no matter if psychoanalysis was heir to Christian confession practices or not.
Since this dispositive began to rule, since psychoanalysis put the silent screams and difficult dreams on the couch and made them talk, the screams and dreams have appeared to open up the access to the inmost centre, even to the secret mystery of culture as a whole. In fact, the dreams and confessions of women were the first objects of Freud's talking cure because this enigmatic unconsciousness, having expressing itself in the hysteric convulsions of Charcot's theatre and later on the form of Freud's strange case histories, was the invention of a higher or subordinate authority which spoke more truly and more honestly than all words.
The unconscious being female and having shown a clearly feminine codification from the very beginning, whoever puts his ear to the unconscious place par excellence, "the mussel" - just like the protagonist in Georges Bataille's Madame Edwarda of 1942 does - believes that he listens to a truer language. The medium of the woman, after centuries which failed to bring male thinking closer to the truth, was introduced as an interface between male thinking and the truth, as a relay of truth closely related to the body: the mouth of female artists also speaks the truth - there is a desire for truth and an economy of its fictions which also controls the contemporary interest in female art, no matter if it has ever fulfilled this desire or not. In fact, even those two or three generations of female artists who devoted themselves to the deconstruction of these myths of femininity profit from their post-psychoanalytic business.
But, actually, what sort of business is it all about if you talk about silent screams, difficult dreams? The answer - it's about the business of Dream Interpretation - will occur to you as soon as you do not only turn to the silent screams of the unconscious but also deal with the difficult dreams. The first milestone of the academic unraveling of femininity, Freud's Interpretation of Dreams of 1899, brought to light strange dreams which not only paved the way for psychoanalysis; these dreams also laid the foundation of surrealism for a fundamentally female art (which, quite surprisingly, could as well be produced by men) - for a female art about which you are forced to talk exclusively in terms of dreams since surrealist arts critique.
It was in his interpretation of Wilhelm Jensen's short novel Gradiva of 1903 that Freud demonstrated for the first time how the interpretation of art coincides with the interpretation of dreams. The title does not stand so much for the protagonist of the narrative hides, a bone dry scientist, but rather for his suppressed childhood sweetheart who appears to him in the form of a hallucinated Roman goddess. For his interpretation, Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva published in 1907, Freud made use of narrated fragments of dreams for the first time - and thus created the basis for the new business of psychoanalytic interpretation of literature. And, at the same time, the business of an art which is closer to the difficult dream than to a reality as complicated as a dream. In fact, the female dreams which launched psychoanalysis or made it get up from the couch were complicated not only because they mostly had a violently emotional, if not sexual content. These were difficult dreams also because they were not easy to understand - that's why Gradiva also advanced to the icon of numerous surrealist artists, who, like André Breton did in 1935, decorated their art galleries with the name Gradiva and subsequently have artists like Marcel Duchamp, for example, fit out these galleries afterwards. And this business is still flourishing today.
As a matter of fact, the Gradiva business is flourishing not so much in theory than it is flourishing in arts. In contrast to the golden age of poststructuralism, when in Paris (with Kristeva and Barthes, Deleuze and Derrida, Cixous and Irigaray) the monthly output in new ways of feminine thinking exceeded the number of new fashion designs in the spring couture collection, the theory has in the meantime assumed a certain ascetic reserve, with the only exception maybe of Slavoj Zizek's neolacanianism. Quite some time has elapsed now since Gilles Deleuze issued his slogan devenir femme. Today, the Gradiva business is carried on by more or less discreet ladies who implement their silent screams, difficult dreams in works of art - or who cleverly use the femininity dispositive to keep producing new elements of a never-ending long runner starring female leading actors.
The grande dame of this art, who with superior ease puts the construction and deconstruction of femininity side by side, is, of course, Louise Bourgeois (* 1911). The inscrutable power of her a-logical drawings and graphics comes from worlds of memory and autobiography and also from dream and dream associations. Particularly Bourgeois' drawings insist on a bewildering ambiguity between fiction and reality, mythos and logos, association and deconstruction. The structures often consisting of a few lines only grow rampant into a submarine splendour and abundance of forms which are as impossible to reduce to any logical or meaningful formula as the dreams. Bourgeois radically stretching out her femininity (or its invented tentacles) to the outside, the art of drawing has become more and more female - devenir femme - and this does not only apply to drawings made by women.
Though Sophie Calle (* 1953) works with wholly different media than Bourgeois does, she articulates similar issues: her series Les Recits Autobiographiques frankly plays with the borderline between a narrative which is not necessarily wrong and a photographic reality which may as well be an invention. Calle photographs dreams and invents her own realities - she divests her inner life and appropriates female clichés. In doing so, she keeps quiet about how serious this game actually is: a piece such as Dream Wedding (2000) never lets you know if Calle makes fun of the cliché of a woman addicted to the idea of getting married or if she likes herself in everybody's dreams. Maybe she doesn't even know herself. The one thing which is sure is that the own figure changes into the projection pattern of a game between dream and reality which Calle plays with her spectators.
In Maria Marshall's (* 1966) video Pinocchio (2003), the female universe of images turns into a resplendent movie centering upon an ambiguous female figure. On the one hand, the dreamy and kitschy ambience with candlelight and plastic mysticism evokes a number of parareligious dreams dreamt by young girls. On the other hand, there is nothing more groundless than the patched-up home-made-mystic in the remote trailer. The sign of this trashy unworldlyness, of course, is the small baby doll in the arms of the would-be mother. The little monster in the arms of a mother - who is as monstrous as the monster - reveals itself as a component of a crazy private mysticism which possibly doesn't differ at all from the modern womens' glamorous world of lies.
Also Susan Turcot (* 1966) is connected with her female figures by a mystical bond. In her works, however, the portraits show not a glamorous but rather a gloomy and obsessive shade. And Turcot does not take her preferred female figures to an unworldly and remote mobile home but to the world of history. As if Turcot wished to unveil the manic night side of Marshall's colourful childhood bliss, she devotes her series of drawings to individual figures of women such as, e.g., Mechthild von Magdeburg in Hotel Magdeburg. Lady Love (1998). By means of the keyword Lady Love, Turcot links the secret of the female mystic to the mystery of the female artist. This also happens in her recent drawings of the series Divided Subjects (2003). Here, the artist presents herself as a sort of satellite receiver for extraterrestrial signals, as an antenna for a state of emergency, which, of course, is codified in female terms. Shortly before turning into scripture, Turcot's lines make a pause, however, as if not to let out the mystical secret of femininity - and thus devastating their intimacy rather then relinquishing it. This adds, of course, to the attractivity of this secret.
In her work Fake Female Artist's Life (2003), Mathilde ter Heijne (* 1969) also tells us that this bottomless world between myth and reality is identical with the artist's world. This is the world where the projections of femininity may be decoded better than anywhere else. The modern female artist being a projection figure par excellence, ter Heijne makes three invented puppets of female artists appear on stage in characteristic outfit. The words she puts into the mouths of her self-portraits do not only tell something about the sociology of how role concepts of female artists change in the course of decades; these words do not only report the psychology of a female artist who seems to identify with her suicidal and depressive figures. In the first place, her fake female artists make a statement about the economy of fictions the female artist has been associated with in the past and still is associated with today.
Text: Knut Ebeling
Translation from German into English: Andreas Bredenfeld
