WHEN ART MEETS PSYCHOANALYSIS

"[...] in his subject, the artist always [...] precedes [the psychoanalyst]", said Jacques Lacan. At the Centre Pompidou-Metz, two art historians and two psychoanalysts have brought together a collection of ancient, modern and contemporary works of art to shed light on the relationship between the famous psychiatrist and psychoanalyst and images, and the influence he exerted on certain contemporary artists.

A psychoanalyst and avid collector, Jacques Lacan is best known for his acquisition of Courbet's L'Origine du monde. An icon of desire, this close-up depiction of a woman's genitals was the centerpiece of a collection that ranged from anthropology to modern art and surrealism, and was housed behind a sliding cover painted especially for the occasion by André Masson. "Insofar as it was defined by Leon Battista Alberti as a window open onto the world, the painting has something to do, as a screen, with fantasy", argues co-curator Bernard Marcadé in the exhibition catalog, recalling the Freudian and Lacanian concepts associated with fantasy, such as sublimation, the hidden object (analyzed by Lacan in the painting of Las Meninas by Velázquez, in particular) and the scopic drive (defined by Freud as the desire to possess the other through the gaze).

This wide-ranging program includes works analyzed by Lacan, others influenced by his thinking, and still others echoing it, by artists such as Francisco de Zurbaran, Constantin Brancusi, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Cindy Sherman, Louise Bourgeois, Annette Messager, Maurizio Cattelan, Tatiana Trouvé and Laura Amiel.

OBJECT OF DESIRE

The first section, devoted to the "Stage of the Mirror", a fundamental theory elaborated by Lacan in 1936, uncovers the primordial experience for the development of the child and the construction of identity, and confronts Caravaggio's famous Narcissus with a mirror-trap by Michelangelo Pistoletto, a mirror split in two (Félix Gonzalez-Torres) and an opacified mirror (Bertrand Lavier) - enough to "subvert the subject" and unsettle 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 we held to be the instance of reality shows itself to be in reality illusory, a true instance of misrecognition 1..."

"JE EST UN AUTRE

Another paradox, another "alienation" studied by Lacan: the gaze as an external object that escapes the beholder. To the subject's gaze - an object of vision but also of blindness - the psychoanalyst contrasts "the gaze that is outside", "the gaze of things 1". Having brought about a disjunction between the eye and the gaze, the "schize of the seer and the looked at" - becoming "tableau" - he establishes "the division of the subject [...] in the field of the visible 1". A disjunction admirably staged in Douglas Gordon's 2020 video Upshot, in which a film scene is reflected in a close-up eye. A mise en abyme that, given "the current extension of the powers of the gaze", "between video surveillance, drones and swarms of satellites [materializing] the Lacanian doctrine of the gaze 1", is chilling...

1 Gérard Wajcman in the exhibition catalog

"QUAND L'ART RENCONTRE LA PSYCHANALYSE" CENTER POMPIDOU-METZ
1, PARVIS DES DROITS-DE-L'HOMME, METZ
UNTIL MAY 27, 2024
CENTREPOMPIDOU-METZ.FR