Lessons on Love

 

Kris Paulsen (Rhetoric, UC Berkeley)

The New Narcissus

In On Painting, Alberti reworks the Narcissus myth to tell the origin of painting. He writes, “The inventor of painting, according to the poets, was Narcissus, who was turned into a flower…What is painting but the act of embracing by means of art the surface of the pool?” Narcissism and art, especially the art of self-representation, are intimately intertwined. Narcissism is clearly at work in Dan Graham’s 1977 Performer, Audience, Mirror. Though Graham stares at his own image in a mirror and names the audience as an object of his gaze, the effect of this piece is not solipsism and alienation, as Rosalind Krauss might suggest. By tracing Jacques Lacan’s narrative of narcissism through Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the “intertwining” of subject and object, I argue that Graham’s performance pictures a way to get beyond a subjective and narcissistic representation of the world, to one that offers us a new understanding of our relationship to others – one that is essentially an act of love and of “making visible.” Graham conceptualizes a “flickering” subject, one constituted by the rapid oscillation between subject and object.

The origin of art story that must be invoked here is not the Narcissus myth, but Corinthian myth of Dibutates’s daughter. Drawing, this myth tells us, is invented when she traces her lover’s quivering, breathing shadow on to the wall behind him. I imagine her continuing from his chin to the outline of her own hand overlapping his face. She comes to trace her hand, the hand that draws. As she tries to capture the shape of her body, it runs from her. She is here both subject and object. She will have to chase her hand forever, continuing to the edge of the wall. In this re-imagining of the myth Graham is Dibutates’s daughter, flickering between subject and object, and uniting with the other upon a surface, both visible, both trembling.

Frédérique Baumgartner (History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University)

Reviving the collective body: Gina Pane’s Un-Anesthetized Escalation

In 1974, Italian-Austrian artist Gina Pane, who claimed to belong to the body art movement, indicated about the wounds that she inflicted to herself during her performances: “If I open my body in order for you to look at your own blood, it is by love for you: the Other.” Unlike other representatives of the body art movement whose masochistic acts can be perceived as narcissistic gestures, Pane’s use of her body as an artistic medium is inscribed within her conception of the body as a shared entity, through which relationships with others can be established: “The body as conductor” as Lucy Lippard put it. Pane’s 1971 performance Un-Anesthetized Escalation speaks for this theoretical specificity of her practice, for it is governed by a desire of exchange and communication with the audience – an ambition which itself resonates with facets of love. The action consisted of the artist climbing bare-hand and bare-foot a metal ladder whose rungs were each lined with a series of sharp bits. Photographs of Pane’s ascension were taken during the performance. A selection of sixty-nine black and white enlarged contact prints of film strips, laid out on a vertical panel, exhibited together with the metal ladder that the artist escalated, constitute the report of the action.

When Pane wounded herself as she did in Un-Anesthetized Escalation, she summoned the viewer’s receptiveness, placing him in a position of empathy. But more importantly, through the discomfort that the viewing of the report involves for the spectator, she challenged the latter to face his / her belonging to the collective body, thus responding to her own questioning “Is your body mine?” In this context, the political issues that drove Pane’s actions – for instance, Un-Anesthetized Escalation made expressly reference to the Vietnam War – sought to remind the viewer of his participation within the public sphere. Through a reading of the photographic report and an assessment of the historical context within which Pane executed Un-Anesthetized Escalation (that is, after the May 68 events), this paper examines how elicitation of love sentiments can operate as acts of political resistance.

 

The Embrace of a Disabled Utopia

This paper takes to task the role of visual affirmation on the part of the viewer through a close examination of a "love confession" presented in a video, entitled Kimura-san (1998) by Japanese artist, Tadasu Takamine. Shown as an edited documentation of a live performance, the video contains footage of a quadriplegic man named Kimura-san, for whom the artist provides sexual assistance while working as his caregiver for five years. The work challenges the common perception of asexuality associated with the disabled, bringing into light the artist's compassion for care and identification. Borrowing Kaja Silverman's concept of looking as form of caring/loving, the text examines the role of viewing this work, not at the register of power, but through a complex embodiment of identification, subjective transposition, and openness. These processes ultimately reside in a profound opening up of the self in relation to others. One of the aims of the text is to challenge criticisms of the work as a form of exploitation, and rather to see how it is able to help us locate and acknowledge our own capacity for care.