SLAD
At the Freud Museum in London, the "Freudian slip" is explained by
this example:
A man walking down the
street runs into a friend. His conscious reaction is
to say: "Oh, hi. I'm so glad
to see you."
But he actually has mixed feelings about his friend--unconsciously, he is also
sad to see him.
So despite his conscious intentions, his remark comes out: "Oh, hi. I'm
so slad to see you."
If we imagine the Unconscious to be "structured like a language" (Lacan),
then it seems the Unconscious often speaks the language of irony, slapstick
and farce, a spontaneous gesture of creative wackiness that stands behind conscious
creation and sticks out its tongue.
We've dubbed this action "Slad," as in "to Slad," "to
make a Slad" or the question, "What was the meaning of that Slad?" Slad
has its beginnings in Freud's "Mistake Book" (The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life, 1901) where, to name these mistakes, slips, accidents and
mis-speakings, he coins the German, Fehlleistung, a kind of oxymoron with the
double sense of "faulty achievement" or "faulty accomplishment." His
English translator then skewed the neologism by coming up with the almost-Greek
term parapraxis, carrying the idea of "incorrect practice."
But there's a further shade of meaning that might be forcing
its way through. Given the example from the Freud Museum,
it would appear that a Slad is not
so much a faulty or incorrect action, as an action that is even more revealing,
more truthful, than the doer consciously intended.
Freud himself touched on this when he concluded The Psychopathology
of Everyday Life with the thought that almost all mistakes and chance "can be traced
back to incompletely suppressed psychical material which, although pushed away
by consciousness, has nevertheless not been robbed of all capacity for expressing
itself."
This push by the mind to express itself--all of itself--
somehow, some way, regardless of "social and moral restrictions" could be taken as a
form of natural poetry...an inherent artistry against all odds, regardless
of whether the product is a "Slad" or a work of "art."
The work shown here emphasizes this engagement of the Unconscious
as a darkly comic taskmaster, and considers the possibility
of "the accident" as
a metaphor for art--that odd state of mind which allows accidents to happen
and have meaning.
The piece by ALLEN RUPPERSBERG, "Brain," seems to examine consciousness
in its rigid, Slad-defensive state, girdled in the impossible effort to bar
any kind of unforeseen event. Consciousness here wants to propel itself back
and forth in an obsessive bounce of its own projected visions, projection given
a literal nod by the use of old projector screens. This effort to gain omnipotent
control is doomed, however, which might be why the "mirror" images
don't face one another.
In a way, JIM SHAW takes an opposite approach by using
images drawn from dreams, when the conscious mind is off-guard.
In his "Dream Objects," a credit
card is scraped across a striped painting until the motion forms a blurred
grid. This was a dream event which Shaw (then deeply in the red) re-enacted
upon awakening. Maybe the process hints at the inexact boundaries of
consciousness. And as Freud touched upon (and Breton went
on about), there's the suggestion
that dream life may be constant and coincident with waking life, another
kind of reality which periodically breaks through.
ROCHELLE FEINSTEIN's "Someone Else's Past" and "Something
For Everyone" examine the quirky path of meaning as
it turns to become its opposite. Try as one might to hide
it, the personal becomes impersonal and
affection can be read as boorish demand when, for instance, the phrase "Love,
Paul" turns the signature of a love letter's closing into a childish
insistence for that particular emotion.
The viewer stumbles into seeing
what isn't really there in JEANNE DUNNING's "Long
Hole" where it's "now you don't see it, now you do." Here,
the familiar becomes all too familiar and the image of a curled hand
doesn't stand
a chance against a more anal reading of the piece, which asserts itself
almost against the conscious wishes of artist and viewer.
The appearance of uncontrolled images and unclaimed, exaggerated
sex fantasies might also be central to the work of LISA YUSKAVAGE. “Helga” is
a portrait-like rendition of a Wyeth-esque beauty who gets stuck
with a questionable sexual subtext; the high-level technique can't
help but paint a low-level conception.
There are mixed messages in these images which seem to have overpowered
the censor and made their presence felt.
JEAN BLACKBURN's piece is riddled with cross-purposes,
as well. Obsessively drilled and poked into, what once had
been a table with place settings
is transformed into something disturbingly different, the familiar
literally deconstructed
until its function, if any, is unknowable. The piece is like a
conversation: intimate, rolling over in ambiguities, and
filled with holes.
Finally, the possible meanings of chance and circumstance are somewhat
happier in "Musical Comedy Medley #1" by THOMAS TROSCH, who offers up a series
of uninhibited happy accidents and gladly found language from the poetry of
Broadway musical comedy. It's Lorenz Hart, not Freud, who could be celebrated
here. Then again, it was Hart who wrote: "If it hurts, that's love."
At some point in each of these pieces, at some level, the
artist willingly opens him or herself to allow a series of
Slads, creating
work that
is only partially "controlled" by conscious process.
This is different from the type of "slip" that sometimes
occurs, when we place the banana peel on the floor while knowing
full well we're in for a fall. The "faux
Slad" actually serves as a defense against the surprise,
uncertainty and possible humiliation of a real upset. Like a
Slad, the work of art can disquiet
and confuse the artist, before it is placed before the public,
offered up to others for multiple interpretations.
And last:
to stretch it further, condensed in the single event
of the Slad are many themes of Modern and Postmodern thought:
memory as fiction,
conscious
thinking as merely one mode of mind, the central place of the
subjective, the blurred boundaries between "normal"/neurotic
and serious/absurd, the insistence on meaning, the importance
of the random and inessential...and,
perhaps, the equivalent nature of mind and art.
Mary Jones and Janice Krasnow
©1997 |
