#584 Jouissance
64x84 cm | Filler, pine panel
About
This work explores the flatness of language and its infinite plasticity. We experience the world through language. It settles like a membrane over raw matter, covering it completely. It conceals it, even as it renders it intelligible to us.
Language and desire are deeply intertwined. Entering into language allows us to perceive the world from a subjective position. At the same time, language separates us from the external world and from our own physical bodies. A difference is produced, a distance. A lack.
From this lack, desire is born — a desire that can be understood as the subject’s search to (re)unite with the material world, to overcome its alienation. This desire is not conscious, yet it drives all human activity beyond the purely biological.
The title refers to the Lacanian concept that is usually left untranslated from French. Lacan was primarily concerned with what he described as “surplus jouissance,” a term inspired by Marx’s notion of surplus value. My use of the term differs significantly, though I am influenced by his theory regarding the relationship between language and desire. While our recourse to language as a way of addressing our predicament may be compulsive, I believe it also involves a certain dimension of enjoyment.See a work-in-progress video here and a presentation video here.
Tablet
Perception is an interpretation and thus consists of language in the same manner as understanding words. To the mind, a word is always also an image. In that sense, understanding words function no differently than normal perception. When we see, images are constructed inside the mind. We never perceive reality objectively or in itself.
However, to use language, we have to speak or write it. We have to realise it. Nothing ever communicates without being inscribed into a matter of some sort. But how words are inserted into reality affects how we perceive them. Thus, reality itself seeps into language. There exists no clear or unmediated communication. Matter adds to the message. Because the matter we choose to communicate through and how we shape it reflects on who we are, it can reveal unconscious or hidden meanings.
Humans inscribed the first written words in stone or clay. One of the purposes was to save them for the future, to protect them from the volatility of time. To speak or to write is always, to some extent, an act of power. The receiver must initially submit their attention to the message. No matter how insignificant, its meaning will always, in some way, change the receiver forever.
There is a constant tension between language and reality as matter. The human subject is defined by an individual will, as opposed to the strict causality of nature. This will strive to be expressed through language. Maybe self-awareness is a result of language use. Language as a way for the ego to invent itself, to inscribe itself into the world. It is no coincidence that many of the first examples of texts are curses, prayers, laws, or inventories — different ways of trying to influence and master reality.Res Ipsa
Res Ipsa is a compilation of works made by an act shaping the filler once it is prepared inside the frame. The works thus function as a recording device and give a statement of the event taking place while the filler was still wet.
Res Ipsa is Latin for "the thing itself" and is part of the juridical term "Res ipsa loquitur" (the thing speaks for itself), used when an injury or accident in itself clearly shows who is responsible, such as an instrument left inside a body after surgery.
