“In his subject, the artist always precedes the psychoanalyst,” said Jacques Lacan. At the Centre Pompidou Metz, two art historians and two psychoanalysts have brought together a collection of ancient, modern and contemporary works of art to shed light on the relationship the famous psychiatrist and psychoanalyst had with images, and the influence he exerted on certain contemporary artists.
A psychoanalyst and avid collector, Jacques Lacan is best known for his acquisition of Courbet’s L’Origine du monde. An icon of desire, this close-up depiction of a woman’s genitals was the centrepiece of a collection that ranged from anthropology to modern art, including surrealism, and was housed behind a sliding cover painted especially for the occasion by André Masson.
“Insofar as it was defined by Leon Battista Alberti as a window open onto the world, the painting has something to do, as a screen, with fantasy,” argues Bernard Marcadé, co-curator in the exhibition catalogue, recalling the Freudian and Lacanian concepts associated with fantasy, namely sublimation, the hidden object (analysed by Lacan in Velasquez’s painting of the Meninas, in particular) and the scopic drive (defined by Freud as the desire to possess the other through the gaze).This wide-ranging program includes works analysed by Lacan, others influenced by his thinking, and still others echoing it, by artists such as Francisco de Zurbaran, Constantin Brancusi, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager, Maurizio Cattelan, Tatiana Trouvé and Laura Amiel.
Object of Desire
The first section, devoted to the “Stage of the Mirror”, a fundamental theory elaborated by Lacan in 1936, uncovering the primordial experience for the development of the child and the construction of identity, confronts Caravaggio’s famous Narcissus with a mirror trap by Michelangelo Pistoletto, a mirror split in two (Félix Gonzalez-Torres) and an opacified mirror (Bertrand Lavier): all of which “subvert the subject” and unsettle our gaze, and more: “Having no thickness other than that of the image, the Ego [reflected in the altered mirror] shows itself […] an inconsistent, fragile, threatened dimension, and what we held to be the instance of reality shows itself to be in reality illusory, a true instance of misrecognition…”. 1 .
“I” Is Another
Another paradox, another “alienation” studied by Lacan: the gaze as an external object that escapes the beholder. To the subject’s gaze – an object of vision but also of blindness – the psychoanalyst contrasts “the gaze that is outside”, “the gaze of things “1. Having established a disjunction between the eye and the gaze, the “schize of the seer and the looked at” – becoming “tableau” – he institutes “the division of the subject […] in the field of the visible” 1 A disjunction admirably staged in a video by Douglas Gordon from 2020 entitled Upshot: we see a film scene reflected in an eye framed in close-up. It’s a mise en abyme that, given the “current extension of the powers of the gaze” “between video-surveillance, drones and swarms of satellites [materialising] the Lacanian doctrine of the gaze “1, is chilling…
- Gérard Wajcman in the exhibition catalogue
Until May 27
Centre Pompidou-Metz
57 000 Metz
France – Metz