Criticism

Article: Jacqueline Rose(b. 1943) ‘Sexuality in the Field of Vision’
The theory at stake in this article lies in the first sentence of this extract.
"[…] Freud often related the question of sexuality to that of visual representation."
The readers are initiated into the issues surrounding Freud’s theories with(in) the realm(s) of sexuality in a manner that places us on a fence where either side is black/white while the path(fence) is grey.
As the reader continues tracing this path, it appears to be a metaphor of the next sentence.
“Describing the child’s difficult journey into adult sexual life,…”
This grey path would correspond with Jacqueline’s opinions as a representation of “…..the complexity of an essentially visual space.” On this path the concept of sexuality is like beam-balance that is tilted more under the load of ‘subjectivity’ than the side of ‘content’. Since subjectivity gains more credit (here), it is only logical that, “The relationship between viewer and scene is always one of fracture, partial identification, pleasure and distrust.” Thus the viewer ends up creating his identity based on his response to the ‘scene’(according to Jacqueline Rose). I would like to stress the nature of creating being a process within which ‘identity’,(according to Rose) seeks to position itself when its very being is a process.
Jacqueline views Freud’s theories as an analogy of ‘sexual identity being an imagination.’
If ‘for Freud’, ‘ our sexual identities as male or female, our confidence in language as true or false, and our security in the image we judge as perfect of flawed, are fantasies’ then his theories are subject to the same analysis and thus fall into the category of fantasies.
Rose deliberately or unconsciously doesn’t draw this conclusion but chooses to turn ‘ these archaic moments’ into ‘ theoretical prototypes’ to subject the presence of the sexual in representation to new interpretations. She uses Freud’s implications to conclude that the ‘chief drives’ of art that address this issue is “to expose the fixed nature of sexual identity as a fantasy and, in the same gesture, to trouble, break up, or rupture the visual field before our eyes.’
Ironically, the statements she uses as a base to justify her conclusion throws this very conclusion into the category of ‘fantasies. Either she is aware of this and/yet chooses to move further or this fact has escaped her notice. This ambiguity will hopefully be solved in the remaining article.
From the way I see it, the term ‘staged’ implies something that is manifested in the physical. Rose then asserts that the ‘staged’ happens only under the condition that ‘that staging has already taken place’. She doesn’t specify where this staging should have taken place. This causes me to conclude that the ‘where’ refers to ‘the visual field’.
Rose asserts that the ‘encounter between psychoanalysis and artistic practice’ happens because it has already happened numerous times. So, Is the difference in this final/intermediate encounter and the past ones the ‘place’ where it occurs? Where it turns from a ‘happening’ into a ‘representation’? But again, how can the two be separated when they both belong to the category of ‘fantasies’ according to Freud’s theory stated earlier. It is evident that Rose sees this fact in her statement, “It gives back to repetition its proper meaning and status” as the “constant pressure of something hidden but not forgotten.” At this junction I believe that it more appropriate for this statement to be “… the constant pressure of something hidden, perhaps even forgotten but not erased…”
Rose appears to believe that this hidden realm will come into focus only when the visual field where “our normal forms” of self-recognition (which I prefer to call self-creation) take place, is blurred.
Rose does not elaborate on the term “normal forms”. Are these normal forms objective or subjective? Are they also subject to “a staging that has already taken place”?
Then Rose raises three issues simultaneously. Strangely they appear unrelated to each other. Possibly Rose is attempting to pull three chords from three different directions and knot them at a point.
The third chord displays Rose’s consideration of Freud’s demonstration that history is not “….some truth to be deciphered behind the chain of associations” but rather it “resides within that chain and in the process of emergence”. She propagates Freud’s redefinition of the term ‘history’ as something that lies within the process underlying the chain of language.
Rose further substantiates Lacan’s analysis of Freud’s demonstration. Lacan viewed the chain of language as individual units that come together to produce meaning. Lacan states that its truth belongs to that phenomenon that brings the units together and not to some external reference.
“Language rests on a continuum which gets locked into discrete units of which sexual difference is only the most strongly marked. The fixing of language and the fixing of sexual identity go hand in hand; they rely on each other and share the same forms of instability and risk.”
Thus Rose implies that sexual identity is a product of language and therefore cannot have an individual status (identity).She is also hinting that language is highly dependent on sexual identity to establish its nature.

Critical Comment

“A work conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature is a text.”
Roland Barthes(1915-1980) ‘ From Work to Text’

This is an attempt to come to an understanding of the term ‘work’ in this definition of it.
Is a work a product assumed to be finished , having gone through a process? Since… perhaps it may not have been released from it. It symbolizes a time period by its nature of being and having been. Apart from the time and space it represents, it symbolizes the process it was ( and is) subject to , not excluding future allegations. Since it represents more than a history of associations attached to it by continuing to exist in an environment that uses it , ‘Use’ in the sense of giving it a reason to still exist, can this ‘work’ be ‘conceived, perceived and received in its integrally symbolic nature’? If this nature lies only in the fact that it undergoes these three processes, be it in any context … probably then it becomes a text.
If its integral symbolism lies in the material that constitutes it, then every material understood and experienced as what it is is a work turned into text.


Neha Jiandani
3rd yr BVA
Art History Dept.
Chirtra Kala Parishath
26/4/07

A Museum Visit

Creative writing

If a work of art needs only to have some characteristics that classifies art, be it in the contemporary or conventional sense, then I am justified in selecting any object present in this museum (this satisfying some of the requirements ). Now questions arise concerning the objects that were installed here to serve a specific function (which is neither artistic nor aesthetic).Not only these , but the very structure, architecture being an integral part of the museum- could they acquire the status of ‘art objects’? Considering even the humans who are strolling around looking in awe at objects whose status they have probably equaled ( if this argument stands) only by their physical entry into this structure even before setting their eyes on any object.
Knowing ( in accordance with ‘common’ sense ) that this argument would not stand , I used the word ‘some’ and not ‘one’ in the opening sentence.
Right now I sit before an object( a bulletin board) that visibly satisfies not only some but many conventional characteristics of art . Apart from being within a frame , its got shapes, lines , tones, text and even con-text. But it stands here not as a work of art which is too meager and clichéd a position . It stands here as a Triumphant Revolutionary having pulled down the very structure that supports it. Being on an easel, it has destroyed the identity of this place. It has proved that works in a museum are not art works but processes. Therefore if every frame is a process then this structure is not a museum.
Even this work on paper ‘being’ created by me is supported by this Revolutionary( the Bulletin Board).


Neha Jiandani
3rd yr BVA
Art History Dept.
Chitra Kala Parishath
25/4/07