A friend said recently, “If there’s a word for it, it exists.”
How do you account for the weird, middle feeling between seeing and speaking? The struggle to articulate the unnamable, unspeakable, strangeness or something. A gap between sight and speech. Thought and execution.
Really, painting and psychoanalysis aren’t so different. If you’re doing it right, you hate your analyst. You hate the way it works on you. You fall in love. You oppose. You obstruct. It works, really, or it’s supposed to be that way. Sometimes it’s a dead end, sometimes it’s progress masquerading as a dead end.
A friend, just a few weeks ago, spoke about how she struggles to get these little frowns perfectly correct. These little squiggles that, when looked at objectively, you really can’t classify as having an emotion at all. They escape description. How do you talk about them?
Your analyst, unlike your garden variety therapist, is not supposed to offer advice. They exist to hear your thoughts, to help you sift through them and, hopefully, eventually, remember. A years-long process, requiring a daily commitment. If you are the patient, your analyst remains mute, reflecting only what you say at them. If you’re the analyst, you hear everything, but remain in the dark. Painting requires this same sort of relationship. The mirror shows you everything. The work, like free association, always tells on you, even when it’s suppressed, something bubbles up. Another friend spoke to me longer ago about how he has found picking a subject and iterating to be the most fruitful approach to working. This subject, chosen arbitrarily, reflects as much on him as the way it’s iterated. Best not to dwell on this too much.
A third friend talks to me a lot about failure (honestly, who hasn’t). Art’s implicit failure. A work of art can never be doubled over, screaming into the carpet, “I’m here! I’m here!” the way a person can. A work of art is just there. Its primary value in its ability to persist. Art functioning like a bog body. Submerged. Pristinely, if muddily, preserved. What can it tell us about human life? What can it tell us about anything? The bog body confirms what we already knew: we existed. The earth will swallow you. Evidence of someone in deep trouble. (haha)
The most interesting thing about psychoanalysis (or at least in the top ten most interesting things) is that it’s unclear if it actually works. There is a deep skepticism around the practice. Has talking ever helped anything? How are you supposed to come to terms with the irrational? The image screen, the id, the Oedipus complex. All ludicrous on their face, but compelling, also in their occulted drama. Can’t you say that about painting? About the way the work tells on you? About how somehow, someway, this thing keeps coming back from the dead. Repetition compulsion. Maybe I can really get it right this time! The attempt, consistently inadequate, but maybe not forever.
Jacob Brooks, Curator
