The failed and the inadvertent art history and the concept of the unconscious (unillustrated version

This paper examines the ways that the idea or notion of the unconscious affects currentthinking about the control artists have over their works; I argue that in this more general sense,p

THE FAILED AND THE INADVERTENT:

ART HISTORY AND THE CONCEPT OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

This paper examines the ways that the idea (or notion) of the unconscious affects currentthinking about the control artists have over their works; I argue that in this more general sense,psychoanalysis has tended to help art historians take away artists’ control and awareness of theirown work, replacing it with the model of artists as workers largely unaware of what they do.Against this I argue that artists who are imagined to “preside over their work with their eyesopen” can be more interesting subjects, both historically and psychologically

Caveat emptor

This essay was written in 1993, when I was involved in teaching a course on psychoanalysis and

painting, and it was published in 1994, in the International Journal of Psycho–Analysis 75 part 1,

pp 119–32 The version posted here has been revised (as of August 2001)

I don’t consider it at all out of date, even though its examples are beginning to look a bit old Itraises two problems that are very current and entirely unresolved:

1 What kind of critical response is best when an art historian is influenced by analysis but declines to make that influence explicit?

psycho-2 What effect does the concentration on artists’ unconscious desires have on art history’sultimate purpose of building a full account of art and its history?

At the time I was surprised to discover how fragmented psychoanalytic art history is It had, andstill has, at least five strands: (a) extremely conservative and simple applications of psychoanaly-sis to paintings, as in Kramer (1970); (b) extremely sophisticated applications of psychoanalysis,mostly by Lacanian scholars; (c) work infused with feminism, deconstruction, semiotics, or acoctail of other poststructuralist concerns; (d) work informed by Jung; (e) work that is only dis-tantly, indistinctly, or inexplicitly psychoanalytic, as in Fried (1990) The four strands—theycould easily be divided into many more—appear in different journals and have largely distinctreaderships Vexed as I was about that situation, I was most interested in the fact that eventhough only a few art historians would say they write psychoanalytic art history, a large number

—perhaps even the majority—write versions of (e) Because they do not refer explicitly to choanalytic sources, such scholars are especially difficult to agree with, argue against, or buildon.

psy-Since the essay was published, in 1994, I have extended these thoughts in two directions:

1 The fact that psychoanalysis makes artists into puzzles became the principal theme of

my book Why are Our Pictures Puzzles? On the Modern Origins of Pictorial Complexity

(New York: Routledge, 1999)

2 The meditation on Fried’s work, and on art historical writing in general, developed into

Our Beautiful, Dry, and Distant Texts: Art History as Writing (New York: Routledge,

2000)

The unconscious remains problematic It has always been indispensible to sis, and in some ways it is the essential precondition of psychoanalysis itself (Freud thought asmuch, and called it his most important discovery; see Freud [1900, 611]) Though it is still pos-sible to speak of a single “unconscious”—there have been no theories that begin by claimingFreud was fundamentally mistaken in that one central tenet—the varieties and schismatic ver-sions of the unconscious are sometimes so radical that only extended qualifications can demon-strate their allegiance to the originary concept Even within Freud’s writing there are differencesbetween the latent unconscious of the earliest writing, the formal “Ucs.” of the first topography,and the more generous “Unconscious” of the second The concept of the unconscious is surpris-ingly insinuant, and in particular it is at once heretical (prone to radical and continuous criticalrevision), peripatetic (apt to travel to neighboring disciplines) and metamorphic (likely to be un-recognisable in new contexts) Ideally, a heresiology of the unconscious would be required to

psychoanaly-demonstrate where it appears under other names (or under no name at all) (Laplanche, 1976,

1989, 5–16)

But the vagaries of the concept, central as they must remain for psychoanalysis, are less

my concern here than their appearances in art historical texts What chiefly interests me, andseems in need of investigation, are two traits of those art historical texts that I will loosely de-scribe as psychoanalytic in tone, whether they are authored by historians or analysts: (a) they as-cribe a large component of artistic production to the unconscious, and (b) they value the uncon-scious over the intentional In short they propose—often “unconsciously”—that what is impor-tant about artistic creation is precisely what is unconscious

This idea seems to me to be mistaken It infects an wide range of art historical texts, fromthose whose indices list “Freud” and the “unconscious” to those that speak loosely about inten-tion and remain silent on theoretical forebears It appears most insidiously and commonly as anunargued assumption in texts whose authors would not describe their works as psychoanalytic oreven psychological What I have in mind here is not a comprehensive refutation of this idea, butthree more local explorations that I take to be decisive for the possibility of sensible exchanges

on this subject: (a) the case against the privileging of the unconscious in psychoanalytic art cism, taking Liebert’s study of Michelangelo as an example; (b) the argument against the morecommon kind of text in which psychoanalysis is not mentioned but the privilege of the uncon-

criti-scious is nevertheless decisive, with an uncommon text, Michael Fried’s Courbet’s Realism, as

the example; and (c) a reading of Cézanne intended to suggest how interpretations of scious imagery and intended forms can be brought together in a fruitful and nonrigid manner

uncon-A recent issue of October echoes a sentiment increasingly prevalent in art history: that

the traditional psychoanalysis of artworks is misguided, and should be abandoned in favor ofother ways of reading the dual histories of psychoanalysis and art history It is suggested, for ex-ample, that [   ]

Here I do not want to argue against these new possibilities, but rather to suggest that it isrisky to assume that the older traditions can simply be abandoned As Freud would have coun-selled, desires and traditions are not so easily overturned; and in this [   ]

If there is a scholarly literature that deserves execration, it is uncreative psychoanalytic

art history Mondrian’s alleged exposure to the Urszene, Cézanne’s masturbation or the hidden

labia in his landscapes, Leonardo’s traumatic “feeling of loss of penis,” and Vermeer’s tive “barriers” against his own concupiscence, are readings guilty of the most irresponsible cut-ting of context, regardless of their potential truth—and that is my first objection to the high valueput on the unconscious (Niederland, 1976; Reff, 1962; Eissler, 1961; Kramer, 1970; Geist,1988) The richness and nuance of historical research are excised in favor of violently reductiveinterpretations, and the result is artwork that is less interesting than it had been To see repression

ineffec-in Vermeer, one cuts the sum of sensitive accumulated historical connections that have been tiently built around the name “Vermeer”; to see labia in a Cézanne landscape, one cuts the land-scape with one’s eyes until nothing remains but the fetish and the excuse for presenting it LeoSteinberg is best on this point In a critique I will discuss below, he takes Robert Liebert to task

pa-for seeing a family drama in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment It is “inappropriate,” Steinberg says,

to collapse the “nearly four hundred” figures in the Last Judgment to a “three-way altercation”

between Christ, the Madonna, and St Bartholomew, and “to have St Bartholomew out to knifethe Madonna, with a rebarbative Christ dispatching his disciple to hell—and all this because theartist’s alleged oral deprivation in infancy continued to fester” (Steinberg, 1984a, 44) I do thinkthat the virulence of this writing needs to be taken seriously, entirely apart from the historicaland formal reasons Steinberg has for doubting part of what Liebert says Steinberg’s energy is di-rected at the toxic effects of the strong, simpleminded stories that are forced into our contempla-tion by such readings

Most criticism of psychoanalysis in art history has centered on the epistemological lems of explanation and evidence that are inevitable when the artist is no longer available to be

prob-quizzed about his youth (Ricoeur, 1970, 170 ff.) But questions of interest should not be

over-looked: would we go to a museum to see a documentation of defense against multiple primalscenes? Or rather to see a painter whose meanings stretch from the asymmetries of Manet to thetopography of the Dutch landscape? We value the Wolf Man, the Rat Man and others because ofthe lucidity of Freud’s detective work (Ginzburg, 1980); but we do not value Mondrian becausethere’s a chance he might have been documenting a defense against primal scenes.

Freud started these difficulties, of course, with his own aesthetic writings, in particular

Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood The book’s strangeness is not adequately

ex-plained by Freud’s ambivalent “self-description” as Leonardo, nor the fascinating manner inwhich Leonardo’s Renaissance science is both deprecated and explained by means of an uncer-tain fledgling modern “science,” nor by the troublesome epistemology and its well-worn narra-tives of vultures, Egyptian gods, and passive homosexuals, nor by the colloid of genres (biogra-phy, pathography, psychoanalytic reconstruction, art history, connoisseurship, synopsis, mis-taken philology, aesthetics), and it may be that Freud’s text is best studied in comparison with

other unaccountably “wild” texts Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy is a possible parallel “case”: both have an eccentric position in an oeuvre of increasing coherence, both exult in a bricolage of sub-

ject matter, and both possess a rhapsodic, even lurid, theatricality

The wildness is important here because it resulted in a conflicted, ambivalent, and partlyunreadable account of the relation of Leonardo’s conscious and unconscious expression Freuddid not write a clear text, committed—let us say—to the sovereignty of the conscious mind The

turmoil of his Leonardo is salutary It does not mean that the book is easily mined for method or

for insights into Leonardo, but it does mean that later writers have available an example of the

difficulties that should await them in coming to terms with a mind and with works that are

cer-tainly more interesting, and probably more insightful, than their own

Shrinking Michelangelo

The two terms of my title, “inadvertent” and “failed,” and the title of this section, come

from Leo Steinberg’s viperous review of Robert Liebert’s Michelangelo: A Psychoanalytic Study

of his Life and Images (Steinberg, 1984a, 19484b) It is still without peer for its analysis of

cer-tain tendencies in psychoanalytic art criticsm Steinberg takes Liebert to task for thinking that

“meaning is invariably tied to an unconscious expression,” so that Michelangelo’s works are notthoughts or decisions but lapses, things that are failed and inadvertent To Steinberg, “artists, ifthey are any good, preside over their work with their eyes open.”

A writer replying to Steinberg’s review objected that “artists do not stand in any

privi-leged position vis-a-vis the interpretation of their works,” and that aspects of works that are conscious (read: unknown)” need not “represent lapses (read: failures).” In reply, Steinbergclaims:

“un-I have nowhere suggested that impulses from the unconscious informing the ative process must produce lapses or failures What I said was that the specific un-conscious motives Liebert assigns to Michelangelo and imputes to his works donot visibly inform the artist’s paintings and sculptures [Steinberg, 1944a, 52].These positions are a little slippery in that they are easily misstated Steinberg does not say thatartists have absolute control or even “privileged position,” but he does say their eyes are open:they look, they see, they control what they can And what they control is what is interesting.When it’s put this way, the intractability of the debate becomes clear: no matter how the argu-ment might proceed, there will remain the difference between those who prefer to see control andthose who do not This is a false debate: though it seems to be about methodology, historical evi-dence, hermeneutics, and models of the psyche and creativity, it is actually a matter of prefer-ences

cre-I take it that this issue is, in fact, unarguable, and cre-I have put it in the context of this change because the quickness with which the two sides rally their arguments underscores its fu-tility Where there are sides, I side with Steinberg: the texture of thought and the kinds of chal-lenge that are required in dealing with intimidating artists who are in control of their means pro-

ex-vokes me more than do the ways of thinking required in psychoanalytic readings In cal terms, the two are distinct sources of pleasure—one, for me, slightly less engaging than theother.

psychologi-Other issues raised by Liebert’s text can be argued more easily The nudes in the back of

the Doni Tondo are also a vexata quaestio within art history They may be shepherds, angels, ners, neophytes, Neoplatonic figures for love, or mankind ante legem—no explanation is fully

sin-satisfactory Liebert proposes that they are youths “engaged in homoerotic interplay,” acting

Michelangelo’s fantasy of internalized femininity But that fantasy must have been unconscious, since the tondo was commissioned for a wedding, and identifiable homosexual imagery would

have been scandalous For the sake of argument, let us assume that Liebert’s reading is entirelypersuasive, and also that he did not intend malice or irony toward the Doni family: what then wasMichelangelo’s conscious intention? Perhaps he meant to portray shepherds (it is not inconceiv-able that he would have omitted the sheep), or pagan nudes, or figures for the soul The strange-ness of the figures—and their interest for generations of critics—would then be a failure Uncon-scious forces would have impelled him to make some ineffective excuse as he worked in order tokeep the truth of his presentation from his Ego: “Nudity is permissible in pagan figures,” or

“Shepherds often sported with one another.” My point here is not that Liebert is mistaken, butthat the Michelangelo he gives us is less interesting simply because the dynamic of consciousand unconscious is so crisp Art historical meanings have become displaced vehicles of uncon-scious forces Consider instead—again for rhetorical purposes—a Michelangelo who blended an-

gel, shepherd, spiritello, neophyte, sinner, and homosexual Such an act could not be described

by a polarity of conscious and unconscious, but by a web of intended acts It would be an plishment rather than a close call, and it would have the interpretive advantage of allowing us toask how its half-dozen elements are related rather than imagining a rigid puppetry of drive, fan-tasy, and repression

accom-The Drunkenness of Noah in the Sistine has long puzzled historians because it presents

all the figures nude, and because it does not show the Shem and Japheth walking backwards (as

Genesis 9:23 describes) To Liebert this is evidence that “the vision of the fallen father… must…

be masked in the artist’s mind, introducing confusion” (Liebert, 1983, 41) How can the analytic account allow for the possibility that the “confusion” is conscious, and that we are deal-

psycho-ing here with a controlled ambiguation? I ask this question rhetorically The Drunkenness of Noah is an typical case because the question of control cannot be easily adjudicated There are a

number of things Michelangelo could have meant We can imagine, for example, that ifMichelangelo had wanted to say that none are without sin, he might have chosen to represent theheads unturned Or if he wanted to induce shame in the spectator commensurate with the shame

of Noah, he might achieve that by showing us more naked bodies than the story required Or if

he wished to represent his own ambivalence toward naked men, unexpected nudity would haveserved the purpose In making this list of hypotheses, I have mimicked the kind of art historicaltexts that do not mention psychoanalysis directly (which we will consider below), in that words

such as “meant,’ “wanted,” and “wished” can be taken to mean conscious or unconscious

inten-tions How can the two be distinguished? It seems to me that our only way of deciding is to lookfor programmatic departures from the expected story If all three sons were equally naked, if theystared equally at their fallen father, then we could say with confidence that Michelangelo meant

to bend the story But of course the scene is not uniform: there are different gestures and differentdisplays of nudity So here, as in many other cases, the choice is between a Michelangelo who

says something complex—something, I think, that involves all the meanings I have named—by

“mistake,” as a puppet reacts when its strings are yanked, and a Michelangelo who says thosesame things by pulling the strings and orchestrating the drama himself Why assume the former?

Or again, in psychological terms, What motive is there for preferring the former?

The unnamed unconscious in art historical writing

I turn now to the strange but common kind of art historical writing that is clearly analytic without openly declaring its allegiance Such writing does not study the relation between

psycho-conscious and unpsycho-conscious expression, as Freud did in his own aesthetic writings, and it ally refrains from mentioning specific terms of the Freudian metapsychology Instead the textssimply concentrate on descriptions that the artists would have reacted to in the way that Freudsays unprepared patients react to interpretations of their unconscious wishes: with amazement,suspicion, and anger.

gener-An essay that goes partway in this direction is Julia Kristeva’s delicately written

“Giotto’s Joy” (Kristeva, 1988, 34, 36) Though it introduces explicit Freudian and Lacanian ory (the latter source is not acknowledged), it does so primarily in order to be able to say thatcolor, unlike form, requires a special hermeneutics Color, Kristeva argues, is “a pressure…linked to the body proper,” “a physiologically supported drive,” and it therefore needs a specialeconomic analysis that is out of the reach of art history Having introduced a “triple register” ofcolor theories, she turns away from theory and toward history and semiotics Her essay has muchmore theory than the average American essay, but the tendency is similar: to make use of Freudwhile remaining independent

the-In most recent art history, the traces of Freud are difficult to locate even where his

influ-ence is decisive An exemplar of this kind of writing is Michael Fried’s book Courbet’s Realism,

the fruit of a deeply layered encounter with psychoanalysis Fried seldom invokes the Freudianlexicon (his footnotes are peppered with various feminist and literary-critical sources), but hisentire enterprise in is avowedly an exploration of the visible traces of Courbet’s unconscious.Typically, the diffusion of the unnamed unconscious is in direct proportion to its declared impor-tance, and the privilege of the unconscious in this book is virtually complete Fried dismisses hissubject’s consciousness literally in a parenthesis:

the philosophical, political and even moral connotations of realism made it all but

inconceivable that a work of art… could be both realistic in effect and imaginative

or metaphorical in relation to its materials (I am convinced that Courbet himselfwas largely unaware of the aspects of his work I focus on in the pages that fol-low.) [Fried, 1990, 5]