WHEN ART MEETS PSYCHOANALYSIS

“In his field, the artist always precedes [the psychoanalyst],” said Jacques Lacan. Two art historians, in collaboration with two psychoanalysts, have brought together at the Centre Pompidou-Metz a collection of ancient, modern, and contemporary artworks designed to shed light on the relationship that the famous psychiatrist and psychoanalyst maintained with images, as well as the influence he may have exerted on certain contemporary artists.

Psychoanalyst and discerning collector Jacques Lacan is known for having acquired Courbet's *The Origin of the World*. An icon of desire, this close-up of female genitalia adorned, behind a specially painted sliding cover by André Masson, a diverse 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," explains co-curator Bernard Marcadé in the exhibition catalogue, recalling the Freudian and Lacanian concepts associated with fantasy, namely sublimation, the hidden object (analyzed by Lacan in Velázquez's *Las Meninas*, in particular), and the scopic drive (defined by Freud as the desire to possess the other through sight).

A vast program envisaged through works analyzed by Lacan, others influenced by his thought, others echoing it, signed, notably, Francisco de Zurbaran, 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 the development of the child and the construction of identity, juxtaposes Caravaggio's famous Narcissus with a trap-mirror 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 thickness other than that of the image, the Ego [reflected in the altered mirror] shows itself […] an inconsistent, fragile, threatened dimension, and what was held to be 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 observer. 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.” Having effected a disjunction between the eye and the gaze, the “schism of the seeer and the seen”—becoming a “tableau”—he establishes “the division of the subject […] within the field of the visible.” This disjunction is admirably staged in a 2020 video by Douglas Gordon entitled Upshot: 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,” is chilling.

1 Gérard Wajcman in the exhibition catalogue

"WHEN ART MEETS PSYCHOANALYSIS" CENTRE POMPIDOU-METZ
1, PARVIS DES DROITS-DE-L'HOMME, METZ
UNTIL MAY 27, 2024
CENTREPOMPIDOU-METZ.FR