« […] in his field, the artist always […] precedes [the psychoanalyst] » said Jacques Lacan. Two art historians associated with two psychoanalysts have brought together at the Centre Pompidou-Metz a collection of ancient, modern and contemporary works of art that shed light on the relationship that the famous psychiatrist and psychoanalyst had with images, but also the influence that he may have exerted on certain contemporary artists.
Psychoanalyst and discerning collector, Jacques Lacan is known for having acquired The origin of the world by Courbet. An icon of desire, this close-up of a woman's sex was coming to flourish, behind a sliding cover painted especially by André Masson, in a very varied collection ranging from anthropology to modern art, including surrealism. "As defined by Leon Battista Alberti as a window onto the world, the painting, as a screen, has something to do with fantasy." advances in the exhibition catalogue the co-curator Bernard Marcadé, recalling the Freudian and Lacanian concepts associated with that of fantasy, namely sublimation, the hidden object (analyzed by Lacan in the table of Meninas of Velázquez, in particular) or even the scopic drive (defined by Freud as the desire to possess the other through sight). A vast program considered through works analyzed by Lacan, others influenced by his thought, still others echoing it, signed, in particular, Francisco de Zurbarán, Constantin Brancusi, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager, Maurizio Cattelan, Tatiana Trouvé or Laura Amiel.
Object of desire
The first section, devoted to the "Mirror Stage," a fundamental theory developed by Lacan in 1936 that reveals the primordial experience for child development and the construction of identity, confronts the famous Narcisse Caravaggio's mirror-trap by Michelangelo Pistoletto, a mirror split in two (Félix Gonzalez-Torres) and an opaque mirror (Bertrand Lavier) – enough to "subvert the subject" and disturb our gaze, and more: "Having no substance other than that of the image, the Self [reflected in the altered mirror] appears […] an inconsistent, fragile, threatened dimension, and what was taken for the instance of reality is shown in reality to be illusory, a true instance of misrecognition"1… ”
"I is another"
Another paradox, another form of “alienation” studied by Lacan: the gaze as an external object escaping the gazer. To the gaze of the subject—an object of vision but also of blindness—the psychoanalyst opposes “the gaze that is outside,” “the gaze of things.” 1 Having effected a disjunction between the eye and the gaze, the "schism of the seeer and the seen"—becoming "painting"—he establishes "the division of the subject […] within the field of the visible 1 "A disjunction admirably staged in a 2020 video by Douglas Gordon entitled Upshot (“Coup d’éclat”): a film scene is reflected in a close-up of an eye. This mise en abyme, given “the current expansion of the powers of the gaze,” “between video surveillance, drones, and swarms of satellites [materializing] the Lacanian doctrine of the gaze,” illustrates this point. 1 ", sends chills down your spine…
- Gérard Wajcman in the exhibition catalogue
"When art meets psychoanalysis"
Centre Pompidou-Metz
1, Human Rights Square, Metz
Until 27 May 2024
France – Metz