An exhibition of the New Vienna Group/Lacan School curated by Brigitte Huck and August Ruhs

30 November 2001 - 27 January 2002, Sigmund Freud Museum Vienna

Brigitte Huck, August Ruhs: On the Near and the Far Side of the Dream. The Jacques Lacan Centenary. In: Newsletter of the Sigmund Freud Museum 2/2001, p. 29.

What we call things are remains that evade judgement.
S. Freud, 1895

Through the edifice of his thought and teaching, for which he laid the foundations in the 1930s and which achieved its full development primarily through the encounter with French structuralism, the eccentric Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) not only had a decisive, and often disputed, influence on the theory and practice of clinical psychoanalysis, but also opened new perspectives on cultural and social phenomena inasmuch as these are related to psychoanalytic issues and questions. Especially through a theory of media that can be termed genuinely psychoanalytic, new experiences and realizations became possible in the field of everyday culture and also in all fields of artistic creativity and its reception, whereby in a retroactive movement the corresponding theoretical concepts have also influenced the production of art.

The two-phase exhibition project, whose first part was realized in September in Vienna's Galerie Charim, deals on the basis of the dream with Lacan's last creative period, which, following the work on the representatives of our inner and outer worlds in terms of image (imaginary) and language (symbolic), was devoted to a theory of the unrepresentable real. This category of the impossible, which means both the border and the threshold of life and can be put in the vicinity of Aristotelian tychism, characterizes not only something beyond the pleasure principle and its mechanics of repetition but also the desire for and the search to find again an experience that as such never took place. In this context Lacan continues along Freudian lines in developing a conception of the "thing" that precedes the object and corresponds to the primal ground of the experience of objects and facts. The dream, at the point at which it resists any further interpretation, also flows into this field. Freud called this the navel of the dream, and Lacan, borrowing from mathematics and topology, attempted to survey the coordinates of this space of the real.

Art has also always attempted to go beyond the manifest (of the dream as well) and fathom the depths of that which, strictly speaking, cannot be imagined, corresponding in the strictest sense of the word to an unconscious. "On the Near and the Far Side of the Dream" thus also deals with the manifest and the latent in art, with arduous artistic attempts to capture the dream and that which lies "behind" it in a way that can be visually and sensorially experienced.

Works by a young generation of artists from Ljubljana will form a centerpiece of the exhibition at the Sigmund Freud Museum, which will be opened on 29 November 2001 at 7 p.m. These artists are in close contact with the so-called Ljubljana Lacan Group led by Slavoj Zizek (Marina Grzinic, IRWIN). The point of departure is Lacan's work with topology and nodology and his attempts to develop models of the psychic apparatus using knots, bands, chains and rings, which in contrast to neuropsychological approaches take into account the structures of subjective experience. The exhibition will show contemporary artworks that have similar motivations and that make reference to that which is beyond the dream, the image and the sign. Works by Ecke Bonk, Inés Lombardi, Peter Kogler, Walter Obholzer, François Rouan and Cerith Wyn Evans will be compared with Lacan's depictions and sketches, whereby their historical and theoretical aspects can also be laid open.

Further examples of artistic associations dealing with the question of the far side of the dream will be provided by the video film "Kitsune" by the Portuguese artist João Penalva and an interactive computer work by Peter Weibel as well as by contributions by Heinz Frank and Dimitri Gutow. Works by Constanze Ruhm, Brigitte Mayer and Nives Widauer will ultimately lead the visitor back to the sensuous categories of the dream.


Review

Die Springerin, VIII 1/02, S. 69-70 (pdF):
Diesseits und jenseits des Traums. 100 Jahre Jacques Lacan, Susanne Neuburger.