I used to think I was too ignorant to read Jeanne Randolph, but thank goodness I got over it. Sometimes art writers (myself included) undertake to write a parallel text, not meant to describe or explain the art, but rather to bounce along beside it as a sort of responsive sidekick. Some (mine included) may tip into flip flights of fancy or indulgent ruminations. But Randolph, a psychoanalytic theorist, remains ever rigorous. The shapes of her short essays are often unsettling and lead off into unfamiliar territory. Even when it is not about art, Randolph's writing is like art, good art, in that it can shift you into a new position from which to look out at the world.
[Sigmun Freud's] desk, writing tables, windowsills, shelves and tops of cabinets had all been invaded by tiny, ancient figurines. On every surface Freud had stationed the pagan, the supernatural, the demonic and the life-giving beings of antiquity. ... [D.W.] Winnicott would have understood Freud's teeming collection as providing "room for the idea of unrelated thought sequences." Room for surprises, nonsense, non sequiturs, room for the unexpected. Room for the uncanny and the preternatural. Room for the protohuman, subhuman and uberhuman. Room for the extremes of difference that standardized life and standardizing ideologies refuse to accomodate. The relevance of this is completely obvious to everyone who is labelled as a stranger by his or her own society. From the essay "The Metamorphosis of Sigmund Freud" from the 2003 collection Why Stoics Box
At the moment when I know that I am the one weilding the power to interpret an object, when I find the interpretation more valuable to me than the function that the object serves, at that moment the object could become cultural. From the essay "Illusion and the Diverted Subject" from Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming, as quoted in Symbolization and its Discontents
It takes two to tango and two (minimum) to communicate. Sometimes the excitement about looking at good art is the strange detachment of the persons, yourself and the artist, from this third thing: the unique idea that comes into being when both parties have paid attention. Add a third generative element - a writer paying the same kind of attention - and the ideas become thicker, quicker, and stranger.
Either golden moon or glitter of stars sparkled on alternate bright blue fingernails as they levitated over [the library clerk's] keyboard. Her green eyes followed signals on her video display terminal and she pricked one of these with the lunar nail of her right forefinger. With her left hand she peeled a barcode from a dispenser. She applied the barcode to the back of this book and smoothed it with her palm. She repeated this procedure exactly for the "seventh" book. "This will pass also, " she slurred, obviously unaware of the cosmic implications of what she had uttered. From the essay "Hi-Tech Surveillance and Moral Imagination: A Psychoanalysis" (the tale of the act of stealing a very old library book) from the 2003 collection Why Stoics Box
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I used to think I was too ignorant to read Jeanne Randolph, but thank goodness I got over it. Sometimes art writers (myself included) undertake to write a parallel text, not meant to describe or explain the art, but rather to bounce along beside it as a sort of responsive sidekick. Some (mine included) may tip into flip flights of fancy or indulgent ruminations. But Randolph, a psychoanalytic theorist, remains ever rigorous. The shapes of her short essays are often unsettling and lead off into unfamiliar territory. Even when it is not about art, Randolph's writing is like art, good art, in that it can shift you into a new position from which to look out at the world.
It takes two to tango and two (minimum) to communicate. Sometimes the excitement about looking at good art is the strange detachment of the persons, yourself and the artist, from this third thing: the unique idea that comes into being when both parties have paid attention. Add a third generative element - a writer paying the same kind of attention - and the ideas become thicker, quicker, and stranger.
- sally mckay 12-02-2003 2:39 am