o-o-o-o

“At this point I propose to leave the dark and dismal subject of the traumatic neurosis and pass on to examine the method of working employed by the mental apparatus in one of its earliest normal activities I mean in children’s play.

“The different theories of children’s play have only recently been summarized and discussed from the psycho-analytic point of view by Pfeifer (1919), to whose paper I would refer my readers. These theories attempt to discover the motives which lead children to play, but they fail to bring into the foreground the economic motive, the consideration of the yield of pleasure involved. Without wishing to include the whole field covered by these phenomena, I have been able, through a chance opportunity which presented itself to throw some light upon the first game played by a little boy of one and a half and invented by himself. It was more than a mere fleeting observation, for I lived under the same roof as the child and his parents for some weeks, and it was some time before I discovered the meaning of the puzzling activity which he constantly repeated.

“The child was not at all precocious in his intellectual development. At the age of one and a half he could say only a few comprehensible words; he could also make use of a number of sounds which expressed a meaning intelligible to those around him. He was, however, on good terms with his parents and their one servant-girl, and tributes were paid to his being a ‘good boy. He did not disturb his parents at night, he conscientiously obeyed orders not to touch certain things or go into certain rooms, and above all he never cried when his mother left him for a few hours. At the same time, he was greatly attached to his mother, who had not only fed him herself but had also looked after him without any outside help. This good little boy, however, had an occasional disturbing habit of taking any small objects he could get hold of and throwing them away from him into a corner, under the bed, and so on, so that hunting for his toys and picking them up was often quite a business. As he did this he gave vent to a loud, long-drawn-out ‘o-o-o-o,’ accompanied by an expression of interest and satisfaction. His mother and the writer of the present account were agreed in thinking that this was not a mere interjection but represented the German word ‘fort’ ['gone']. I eventually realized that it was a game and that the only use he made of any of his toys was to play ‘gone’ with them. One day I made an observation which confirmed my view. The child had a wooden reel with a piece of string tied round it. It never occurred to him to pull it along the floor behind him, for instance, and play at its being a carriage. What he did was to hold the reel by the string and very skilfully throw it over the edge of his curtained cot, so that it disappeared into it, at the same time uttering his expressive ‘o-o-o-o’. He then pulled the reel out of the cot again by the string and hailed its reappearance with a joyful ‘da’ ['there]. This, then, was the complete game—disappearance and return. As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act.

“The interpretation of the game then became obvious. It was related to the child’s great cultural achievement the instinctual renunciation (that is, the renunciation of instinctual satisfaction) which he had made in allowing his mother to go away without protesting. He compensated himself for this, as it were, by himself staging the disappearance and return of the objects within his reach. It is of course a matter of indifference from the point of view of judging the effective nature of the game whether the child invented it himself or took it over on some outside suggestion. Our interest is directed to another point. The child cannot possibly have felt his mother’s departure as something agreeable or even indifferent. How then does his repetition of this distressing experience as a game fit in with the pleasure principle? It may perhaps be said in reply that her departure had to be enacted as a necessary preliminary to her joyful return, and that it was in the latter that lay the true purpose of the game. But against this must be counted the observed fact that the first act, that of departure, was staged as a game in itself and far more frequently than the episode in its entirety, with its pleasurable ending.

“No certain decision can be reached from the analysis of a single case like this. On an unprejudiced view one gets an impression that the child turned his experience into a game from another motive. At the outset he was in a passive situation he was overpowered by the experience; but, by repeating it, unpleasurable though it was, as a game, he took on an active part. These efforts might be put down to an instinct for mastery that was acting independently of whether the memory was in itself pleasurable or not. But still another interpretation may be attempted. Throwing away the object so that it was ‘gone’ might satisfy an impulse of the child’s, which was suppressed in his actual life, to revenge himself on his mother for going away from him. In that case it would have a defiant meaning: ‘right, then, go away! I don’t need you. I’m sending you away myself.’ A year later, the same boy whom I had observed at his first game used to take a toy, if he was angry with it, and throw it on the floor, exclaiming: ‘Go to the fwont!’ He had heard at that time that his absent father was ‘at the front’, and was far from regretting his absence; on the contrary he made it quite clear that he had no desire to be disturbed in his sole possession of his mother. We know of other children who liked to express similar hostile impulses by throwing away objects instead of persons. We are therefore left in doubt as to whether the impulse to work over in the mind some overpowering experience so as to make oneself master of it can find expression as a primary event, and independently of the pleasure principle. For, in the case we have been discussing, the child may, after all, only have been able to repeat his unpleasant experience in play because the repetition carried along with it a yield of pleasure of another sort but none the less a direct one.

“Nor shall we be helped in our hesitation between these two views by further considering children’s play. It is clear that in their play children repeat everything that has made a great impression on them in real life, and that in doing so they abreact the strength of the impression and, as one might put it, make themselves master of the situation. But on the other hand it is obvious that all their play is influenced by a wish that dominates them the whole time the wish to be grown-up and to be able to do what grown-up people do. It can also be observed that the unpleasurable nature of an experience does not always unsuit it for play. If the doctor looks down a child’s throat or carries out some small operation on him, we may be quite sure that these frightening experiences will be the subject of the next game; but we must not in that connection overlook the fact that there is a yield of pleasure from another source. As the child passes over from the passivity of the experience to the activity of the game, he hands on the disagreeable experience to one of his playmates and in this way revenges himself on a substitute.

“Nevertheless, it emerges from this discussion ‘that there is no need to assume the existence of a special imitative instinct in order to provide a motive for play. Finally, a reminder may be added that the artistic play and artistic imitation carried out by adults, which, unlike children’s, are aimed at an audience, do not spare the spectators (for instance, in tragedy) the most painful experiences and can yet be felt by them as highly enjoyable. This is convincing proof that, even under the dominance of the pleasure principle, there are ways and means enough of making what is in itself unpleasurable into a subject to be recollected and worked over in the mind. The consideration of these cases and situations, which have a yield of pleasure as their final outcome, should be undertaken by some system of aesthetics with an economic approach to its subject-matter. They are of no use for our purposes, since they presuppose the existence and dominance of the pleasure principle; they give no evidence of the operation of tendencies beyond the pleasure principle, that is, of tendencies more primitive than it and independent of it.”

-Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)

Returning the gays

New York Times piece on the preponderance of “gay art” being made and exhibited, presently. In reference to gay publications like Butt and other “edgy,” “creative” type gay-oriented media outlets:

[...] they, like much of the gay art now being made — and so much art and music and culture of all types — seem to hybridize a generalized fetish for youth culture, for self-exposure, for the small and the intimate and apolitical. They are as solipsistic as a Rufus Wainwright lyric. They are as whimsical as one of the neo-hippie Devendra Banhart’s tunes. They have a proudly do-it-yourself aura, but what, these days, does not?

It is not of little consequence that they would describe this kind of work in terms of the very two musicians whom I most loathe. Earlier they cite Larry Clark, to whom I would likewise be more than happy to deliver a swift punch in the junk.

But I’ll cut this crop of artists a deal: I’ll reconsider my deep-seated and problematic contempt for the majority of other gay men when they have something more than vapid, escapist smut to bring to the table.

Unrelatedly, the new Björk album is really not good. I mean, there are moments, but not many. That makes me so sad.

Oh, George

George Baker – The Other Side of the Wall [PDF 1000Kb]

Okay, I just deleted a very long, rather breathless paragraph about how much I love George Baker’s writing, how I don’t care who calls him and old-guard reactionary, how he could probably convince me of anything, if he put his mind to it. It may or may not have ended with me detailing a fantasy of skipping along a beach at sunset, hand-in-hand with him and Miwon Kwon. But there are limits to how much nerding-it-up is really appropriate, even here.

Instead, suffice it to say that his article on Tom Burr from the most recent issue of October is absolutely fantastic. The link above is to a copy of the PDF. By posting it, I’m probably violating every term of my subscription, but I do not care. It’s really, really good, and I, for one, will be reading it over and over again, this summer.

I’m hesitant to summarize it, but, briefly, briefly: first, Baker traces the history of Burr’s appropriation/reconstruction of Minimalism and demolished gay cruising grounds as a means of queer politics, which is the standard reading, but here he does it all by way of Freud’s conception of melancholia and the “Fort/Da Game*.” He goes on, in a really very sweet passage, to talk about how the self-abnegation (a characteristic of Freudian melancholia) can be thought of, in Burr’s work, as both a means of asserting a political and as an act of love and care. The second half of the paper talks about Camp as it relates to Burr’s appropriations (most of this is borrowed from Sontag), about the generosity of Camp, how Camp appropriation can perhaps reconcile the implosion of sculptural practice in the 70s. And it ends with a blistering, blistering tell-off to Jeff Koons and, especially, to Matthew Barney **. I don’t know that I agree with it, but I always, always enjoy it when a critical essay can actually make me clap my hand to my mouth and whisper “oh snap!“

I’m going to be revisiting this, and, for the time being, I’ve just finished reading it, and I’m still kind of buzzed. But oh my god, oh my god, it is good.

—
* The Fort/Da business blew me away, as I’d never heard of it before: the central metaphor is of a child taking masochistic pleasure in repeatedly throwing away his toys and then retrieving them again: for Freud it’s a continual reënactment of the moment of abjection as a response to the mother’s physical absence. This alone, in and of itself, could stand as a statement for my birds, and, indeed, my other tempera paintings. To the point that I’m beginning to question whether or not I, in fact, read about it before, internalized it, forgot it, and then unwittingly made a whole body of work about it–and not even metaphorically. I actually, repeatedly absented [by gessoing] and retrieved [by repainting] actual toys as a response to the actual absence of my actual mother. It’s kind of spooky, to be honest.

**

Barney’s Cremaster project is in fact not only too Oedipal to be Camp, it is too murderous as well (which is of course linked to its Oedipal logic). Indeed, in my opinion, Barney’s work represents a violence more insidious, much more sinister, than mere kitsch. [...] But this specific kind of evocation runs throughout the entirety of the Cremaster cycle. For this is a work obsessed with turning all of the now-canonical signifiers of Camp sensibility, or even a distinctly queer sensibility—S/M, Art Deco, porn, Busby Berkeley musicals, feathers and boas and drag queens—into something like a new archaic mythology. Of course, myth—especially fraudulent myth—is not fun, nor is it frivolous; it is, instead, tragic (if not deeply tiresome). [...] More distressingly, one might even claim that Barney’s work can only be read, in its strict fetishization of the entire panoply of Camp signification, as part of a much longer and deeper social abhorrence of the Camp sensibility. In the incessant, obsessional cataloging of every form of Camp experience in these films, we witness a chilling phobia, an increasingly desperate battle to eradicate the tender social challenge of Camp and of the queer [...] I will go so far as to say: Cremaster is the holocaust of the aesthetic that once produced Flaming Creatures.

And this violence also points to why artists such as Koons, or now Barney, seem to engage with sculpture in their work, only, ultimately, to render the medium desiccated, if not to destroy it altogether. (Cremaster is also the holocaust of the historical medium of sculpture.)

to wit, oh snap!