Category: OPTION COURSE: Framing Art

EXHIBITION—Paranoia—Freud Museum

We were asked to visit the Freud Museum as part of the Framing Art course and in the process think about and try to articulate our responses to it.

At the same time as being the home of Sigmund Freud for the last year of his life, with everything that that entails physically and symbolically, the Museum was also hosting an exhibition of contemporary artworks based on the theme of ‘paranoia’. This juxtaposition of two powerful, potential attributions led to some interesting situations and feelings in the house.

At first glance the house is a fairly typical suburban detached house, in a well-off neighborhood in North London. The first indication that all is not as it seems are the set of three wooden signs staked in the grass on either side of the path to the front door. On them are painted “NO ENTRY”, “NO TRAVELLERS” and “KEEP OUT”1 and—to be fair—caused us to think that there must be another entrance somewhere round the side of the house. If that’s not effective art, then I don’t what is.

Having negotiated our confusion over these messages, we were able to get inside the house. It’s really quite small, with 5 rooms on the ground floor and 3 on the first. The rooms are again styled in a fairly typical British suburban manner, all persian and chinese rugs throughout, and antique furniture. However interspersed amongst this are Freud’s large collection of antiquities from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Orient, which Freud used as symbolic of the activity of the unconscious: “They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation”.

The objects also have a life of their own, beyond simply historical artifacts from Sigmund Freud’s life. Many of them are accompanied by small typewritten labels which give them further meanings relating to Freud’s psychoanalytic analyses. This makes the progress through the house somewhat unsettling, as one is forced to see the house through two sets of eyes concurrently, on the one hand regarding it as a historically significant residence, with all the social and quotidian meanings involved with that; and on the other as a screen through which to read each object as holding symbolic meaning.

The entry of the exhibition to the house add yet a further layer of meanings to the space. The objects are a mixture of photography, painting/drawing and free-standing objects. In many cases the objects are created to work with the existing milieus, and one finds oneself performing a process of double-take at certain points, to try and negotiate the potential readings of any particular view. Glass flamingos2 drink from antique bowls in the study, while others crowd round a table as ghostly remnants. Swimmers with missing limbs are projected onto the ceiling in the library3, as if we’re underwater, below them. Less effective for me were the myriad monitors placed around the house showing videos. Their lack of integration with the surrounding settings seemed jarring, they demanded you mentally remove yourself from the house and enter their little world. Many of these videos seemed trite, however Jean Gabriel Periot’s piece4 impressed me with its mélange of music and snapshots of roads leading to the gas chamber. Having just watched this me and my partner sat on a sofa in the next room and discussed in front of the beautifully effective wolf and deer video (with gunshot)5.

Overall the exhibition was pretty average, with a the few outstanding pieces mentioned above. The premise was a good one, but I felt not dealt with well by most of the artists. If I was to look at one aspect of the house from a Freudian perspective (not that I know much about Freud’s work) I’d have to draw attention to the pacing dog outside in the garden, trying to get in. I’m sure I could read something into that.

  1. Daniel Baker, Wish You Were Here, 2007 installation
  2. Nike Savvas, Zero to Infinity, 2004 installation
  3. Tatjana Struger, Positions, 2004 video
  4. Jean Gabriel Periot, Dies irae, 2005 video
  5. Mircea Cantor, Deeparture, 2005, video

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BOOKS: Blanchot and Bourdieu

I received two new books yesterday to add the library, Maurice Blanchot’s Friendship and Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel’s The Love of Art.

The Bourdieu/Darbel book is one which we’ve been reading in relation to the Framing Art course, looking at museums and their relations with their audiences. The Love of Art is a report on a series of what were essentially market research studies of the visitors to various museums in France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Poland and Greece during 1964–5. They examined the demographic profiles of the visitors to the various targeted sites and their histories in relation to that museum, and to museums and art in general, as well as their perceived needs from the institution, and impressions of it.

Friendship is a collection of essays by Blanchot, a critic and philosopher whose writing cropped up in our readings around the Museums and Photography session for the same course. In particular with reference to André Malraux’s Museum Without Walls. An essay in this collection of Blanchot’s criticism, entitled The Museum, Art, and Time, discusses Malraux’s writings on the museumification of art. I’ve yet to read this essay, but isn’t that the joy of collecting books: The potentialities that they offer for future reading and the sheer impossibility of ever completing them all? Potentialities, by Giorgio Agamben – another book I bought recently and have yet to read.

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CREATIVE JOURNAL—Roland Barthes and Pierre Bourdieu—The Death of the Author

In the previous post I said we’d been reading Benjamin and Barthes, but never got to talking about the latter.

In Roland Barthes’ piece, he talks about the text being a product of the reader more than the writer, where the multiple possible meanings float until fixed by the action of someone reading it:

Thus is revealed the total existence of writing: a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not, as was hitherto said, the author.. . . a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination. (Barthes, 1977, p. 148)

Following from this, Barthes announces the designation of writing as ‘performative’: “in which the enunciation has no other content (contains no other proposition) than the act by which it is uttered” (Barthes, 1977, pp. 145–6) and the ‘death of the author’.

. . . the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceding or exceeding the writing, is not the subject with the book as predicate; there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is eternally written here and now. (Barthes, 1977, p. 145)

[ASIDE: the ‘scriptor’ is Barthes’ reference to the successor to the author under this new regime. The scriptor’s work is not about expression, but the possibility of an “immense dictionary from which he draws a writing that can know no halt.” (Barthes, 1977, p. 147)]

There is an interesting parallel with a text we’ve just looked at for another course that I’m on, the Framing Art course which is concerned with museology. This other text is Pierre Bourdieu’s Cultural Works and Cultivated Disposition (also mentioned in a previous post) where he is analysing the perception of the museum ‘experience’ for audiences, particularly those that feel excluded from this institution:

. . . the history of the instruments of perception of a work of art is the essential complement of the history of the instruments of production of the work, inasmuch as the work of art is in a way created twice over, by the artist and by the spectator, or, rather, by the society to which the spectator belongs. (Bourdieu, 1969, p. 41)

Bourdieu is here discussing issues of attribution and specifically how these affect the “legibility” of a work of art for a particular society.

He is presenting a much more prosaic view of the affect knowledge and education have on the reception of art, but essentially Barthes’ argument is a natural extension of Bourdieu’s comment – that our interpretation of the artwork is as important as the original intention, and the original intention is vague and imprecise.

  • Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press. pp. 142–148.
  • Bourdieu, P. and Darbel, A. (1969) Cultural Works and Cultivated Disposition. In The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their public. Cambridge: Polity Press. pp. 36–50.

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CREATIVE JOURNAL—Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes—Artist/Audience

Today, not for the first time (or the last time, probably), I misunderstood Walter Benjamin’s meaning.

On our Core course we’ve just moved into an area entitled ‘Authors and Author-ity,’ for which the first reading texts are Walter Benjamin’s The Author as Producer1 and Roland Barthes’ The Death of the Author2.

In The Author as Producer, Benjamin begins by outlining the ‘correct tendency’ of works, for them to be useful for revolutionary activity, quoting Brecht: “not to supply the apparatus of production without, to the greatest extent possible, changing it in accordance with socialism” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 214).

He isolates the ‘literary tendency’, and the ‘quality’ of it as being essential to politically correct work:

. . . the tendency of a literary work can only be politically correct if it is also literarily correct. That is to say the politically correct tendency includes a literary tendency. And I would add straight away: this literary tendency, which is implicitly or explicitly contained in every correct political tendency, alone constitutes the quality of the work. (Benjamin, 1977, p. 213–4)

He is here countering what seems to be a rather blinkered opinion on his audience’s part. To introduce the above quote, Benjamin speaks rhetorically for his audience “You can declare: a work that shows the correct political tendency need show no other quality. You can also declare: a work that exhibits the correct tendency must of necessity have every other quality.” (Benjamin, 1977, p. 213).

My misunderstanding stemmed from the phrase “of necessity” in the last quote which I understood to mean “by default”, so completely changing the meaning of this section. Although if I’d thought it through with reference to what is said later, I should have realised my mistake.

So, in the main quote above, Benjamin explains the stress on the quality of a work is necessary for its effectiveness as revolutionary material. This takes the form of using the methods of bourgeois society to transform it from within into something other:

What matters therefore is the exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal. And this apparatus is better the more consumers it is able to turn into producers, that is, readers of spectators into collaborators. (Benjamin, 1977, p. 216)

  1. Benjamin, W. (1934). The Author as Producer. In Frascina, F. and Harrison, C. eds. Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology. London, 1982. pp. 213–216.
  2. Barthes, R. (1977). The Death of the Author. In Image Music Text. London: Fontana Press. pp. 142–148.

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