archive

Exhibition

Exhibition

The OR Gallery is proud to present Rodney Graham’s solo exhibition Are You a Doctor, Sir? The exhibition is constructed around a lecture on Sigmund Freud and pays tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of Freud’s death.

Catalogue Essay by Rodney Graham

In his case-study “Katharina” from Studies on Hysteria, Freud conducts an analysis of an 18-year-old patient suffering from ‘‘virginal’‘ anxiety.l In a single sessions he is able to relieve the girl of a complex of symptoms (vomitting, fainting spells, recurrent hallucinations) brought on by an attempted seduction by her uncle. The substance of the analysis is unremarkable, but its site is curious: a mountain-top in the Austrian Alps.

In the summer vacation the year 189- I made an excursion into the Hohe Tauern so that for a while I might forget medicine and, more particularly, the neuroses. I had almost succeeded in this when one day I turned aside from the main road to climb a mountain which lay somewhat apart and which was renowned for its views and for its well-run refugee hut. I had reached the top after a strenuous climb and, feeling refreshed and rested, was sitting deep in contemplation of the charm of the distant prospect. I was so lost in thought that at first I did not connect it with myself when these first words reached my ears: ‘Are you a doctor, sir?’ But the question was addressed to me and by the rather sulky-looking girl of perhaps 18 who had served by meal and who had been spoken to by the landlady as ‘Katharina’. To judge by her dress and her bearing, she could not be a servant, but a daughter or relative of the landlady’s.

So there I was with the neuroses once again – for nothing could very well be the matter with this strong, well-built girl with the unhappy look. I was interested to find that the neuroses could flourish in this way at a height of over 6,000 feet. I questioned her further.2

Freud alludes to the session in a letter to Fliess from the mountain resort of Reichenau, dated August 20, 1893. “Recently I was consulted by the daughter of an innkeeper on the Rax,” he writes, “lt was a nice case for me.“3 He does not elaborate on the analysis in the letter, but he does report what he calls a “piece of home psychology” containing a strange echo of the account of his surprize encounter with Katharina:

I spent the 18th and 19th on a complicated tour around and on Mount Rax with my friend Rie and yesterday sat in a cheerful mood in the new hut on the mountain when suddenly someone entered the room, completely flushed with the heat of the day, whom initially I stared at as an apparition and then had to recognize as my wife.4

It seems that Freud’s wife, Martha, not normally fond of climbing, had on this day followed her husband to the summit where her sudden and unexpected appearance caused him to experience a momentary feeling of disbelief. Such a feeling, the sensation that “What I see here is not real”, was later to be do-scribed by Freud as ‘derealization’ (Entremdugesfuhl). According to Freud, phenomena of derealization serve the agency of defence-repudiating or warding off a piece of reality to which the ego is hostile – by ‘falsifying’
the offending stimulus. In ‘“A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis”, the 1936 paper which theorizes the concept, Freud draws from his own experience -ironically, the fleeting sensation of unreality he experienced in Athens upon first surveying the view from the summit of the
Acropolis.5

If Freud never ventured an interpretation of his earlier serialization at the top of Mount Rax, this may be due to the veil of discretion he invariably cast over his relations with Martha in his published writings.6 Yet, it is possible that unanalyzed material bearing on this incident found its way into the Katharina analysis, and that the case-study has been embroidered with a kind of
novelistic fiction based on Freud’s surprize encounter with his wife. Could it be that Freud found himself pursuing a literary by-path here, and that it is not a physician but a writer who speaks in the opening paragraphs of the “Katharina” case-study?

Katharina herself first appears as a disembodied voice, posing the question which shatters Freud’s poetical reverie and returns the vacationing physician to his calling: “Are you a doctor, sir?“7 Those familiar with Le Spleen de Paris may have already heard an echo of a question once directed, quite unequivocally, to a poet:

As I was nearing the edge of the suburb, walking under the gas lamps, I felt an arm being slipped into mine and I heard a voice in my ear say, “Are you a doctor, sir?”

I looked; it was a tall, robust young woman with very wide-open eyes, hardly any make-up, and long hair flying in the breeze with the strings of her bonnet.8

“No, I am not a doctor, so kindly let me go” replies the narrator of Charles Baudelaire’s 1867 prose poem “Madmoiselle Bistouri” (Miss Lancet). Nevertheless, motivated by the hidden promise of her invitation – she is evidently a prostitute – he follows the strange woman to her home to be pampered, offered drink and cigars, and shown portfolio illustrations and photographs of famous doctors.

“When we meet next time, you’ll give me a photograph too, won’t you darling?”

“But,” I said, also pursuing my idée fixe, “why do you think I am a doctor?”

“It’s because you’re so sweet and good to women.”

Mademoiselle Bistouri was a fictional version of a real, though somewhat older woman; a Parisian figure of the day dubbed ‘La Mère Bistouri’ by the doctors of the Hôtel Dieu where she was a regular fixture.9

It is his passionate love of mystery (for, he says, “I always hope to find the solution”) that directs Baudelaire to the origin of Mademoiselle Bistouri’s obsessive idea. I shall not be the first to note the uncanny anticipation of Freud’s therapeutic technique (precisely the cathartic method of the Studies) in the question Baudelaire finally asks of her: “Exactly when what it, how long ago, when you first felt this particular urge?” (italics mine).10 The poem ends, the analysis breaks off, with the silence which marks Mademoiselle Bistouri’s confrontation with what Freud will later call the resistances.

Freud often spoke of his literary precursors. Did he know this poem? I think it is likely. I find it likely as well that he was listening to Baudelaire’s voice when he composed the account of his meeting with Katharine. A speculation : does Freud’s literary fiction (and his erotic phantasy) super-impose two unexpected encounters – the doctor with his wife, the poet with the ‘prostitute’? And, does the path which carries Freud away from the main road suggest the destination to which perhaps all narratives lead, and the fulfillment of the promise which all narratives hold out – a seduction?

-Rodney Graham

Edited by William Wood
Published by the Or Galled Society with the financial assistance of The Canada Council
Vancouver 1990
ISBN 1-895006-00-0
Copyright @ 1990 Rodney Graham and the Or Gallery Society

1. Sigmund Freud, “Katharina——”, in Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans., James Strachey and Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1955), vol.II, 125-134. Hereafter cited as S.E.
2. Op. cit., 125.
3. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, ed. and trans., The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, l985), 54. Freud has transposed the setting of the analytic session from the Raxalpe near Reichenau, just southwest of the Vienna Woods, to a peak in the Hohe Tauern, a much higher mountain range in south-central Austria near the Italian border. For geographical specifics see Karl Baedeker, Austria, Together with Budapest, Prague, Karlsbad, Marienbad, 13th ed. (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1929), 179 and 239.

A footnote added to the case-study by Freud in 1924 – which admits to a ‘discretionary’ falsification – is interesting in this regard: “I venture after the lapse of so many years to lift the veil of discretion and reveal the fact that Katharina was not the niece but the daughter of the landlady. The girl fell ill, therefore, as a result of sexual attempts on the part of her own father. Distortions like the one which I introduced in the present instance should be altogether avoided in reporting a case history. From the point of view of understanding the case, a distortion of this kind is not, of course, a matter of such indifference as would be shifting the scene from one mountain to another.” See S.E. II, 134.

4. Freud to Fliess, August 20, 1893, in Masson, page 53.
5. Sigmund Freud, “A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis: An Open Letter to Romain Rolland on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday”, trans., James Strachey, in James Strachey, ed., Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers (New York: Basic Books, 1959), vol. V, 303-312. Freud’s sensation of unreality was an act of unconscious filial ‘‘piety’‘ repudiating the fact that he had ‘gone further’ than his father by attaining Athens.
6. There is, however, additional material in Freud’s August 20th letter to Fliess that could, perhaps, form the basis for an interpretation of the incident. Freud introduces the story of his surprize encounter with his wife by way of introducing the reason for his cancellation of a planned “congress” with Fliess in Csorba. Martha, following a domestic upheaval, wanted to spend a few days with him on the mountain arid Fraud felt obliged to grant her this wish.

He rather stresses the sense of obligation and continues by reminding Fliess that he and Martha are living “in abstinence”, adding: “And you know the reasons for this.” These cryptic remarks suggest that affect-laden material bearing on his and his wife’s sexuality perhaps lay behind Freud’s derealization on the Rax. Here I am struck by the element of contrast in Freud’s description. Martha appears before him as vivid, sanguine (“flushed with the heat of the day”), yet is also ghost-like, unreal (“whom I initially stared at as an apparition”). Could it be that Freud’s observation regarding his wife’s sanguinary and his attendant judgement regarding her lack of reality betray a causal connection? Could it be that the judgement sought to ward off something which a flushed appearance often signifies – i.e. sexual excitement – and that what Freud’s derealization falsified was his wife’s desire?

7. It is in fact incorrect to speak of medicine as Freud’s calling since, by his own admission, he never felt any real vocation to medicine. In the 1926 “An Autobiographical Study” (commissioned for a series of accounts by prominent medical researchers), Freud describes medicine as part of a “life-long detour” through the physical sciences and away from the “great cultural issues” which fascinated him as a child (and to which psychoanalysis was to lead him back). In “An Autobiographical Study”, he attributed his decision to take up medicine as a career to the emotions aroused in him by a public reading of the essay “Fragments über die Natur“, inaccurately attributed to Goethe. This romantic, pantheistic essay describes a feminized nature, likening its revelation to the unveiling of Isis. Incidentally, it is curious to compare the noble sublimation of the essay to the ‘profane’ reflections on medicine found in Act 1, Scene IV of Goethe’s Faust – for Freud cites this, the so-called “Student Scene”, in the next paragraph of in “An Autobiographical Study”. In this scene, Mephistopheles, disguised in Faust’s professorial robes, dispenses advice to a wayward student; after successively rejecting careers in law, theology, natural science and metaphysics, the student becomes confirmed in his vocation only after Mephistopheles points out the sexual opportunities opened up by the career of a physician:

And give the women special care;
Their everlasting sighs and groans
In a thousand tones
Are cured at one point everywhere.
And if you seem halfway discreet,
They will be lying at your feet.
First your degree inspires trust.
As if your art had scarcely any peers;
Right from the start, remove her clothes and touch her bust,
Things for which others wait for years and years.
Learn well the little pulse to squeeze,
And with a knowing glance you seize
Her freely round her slender waist
To see how tightly she is laced.

See Walter Kaufmann, Goethe’s “Faust”: The Original German and a New Translation (New York: Doubleday, 1961), lines 2021-2036, 205-207. The relevant passage of Freud’s “An Autobiographical Study” is S.E. XX, 8-9.
8. Translation by author from Anonyme roman, Jan Vercruysse, introduction, Spleen de Hambourg (Brussels: Yves Gevaert Éditeur, n-d. [1985]), unpaginated. See also, Y.-G. Le Dantec and Claude Pichois, eds., Baudelaire: Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1961), vol. 1, 300. Hereafter cited as O.C.
9. Robert Kopp, in his critical edition of Petit Plumes en Prose, quotes an article by Adrien Marx from L‘Époque of January 30, 1866, which describes “La Mère Bistouris”. See, Charles Baudelaire, Petit Poèmes en Prose, Robert Kopp, ed. (Paris: Librarie José Corti, 1969), 347-8.
10. “Peux-tu te souvenir de l‘époque et de l’occasion où est née en toi cette passion si particulère?“ O.C., 303. Kopp comments : “La psychanalyse freudienne ne cherce pas autre chose!“, op. cit., 349. See also Freud’s milder formulation in “Katharina”: “Frâulein Katharine, if you could remember now what was happening in you at the time, when you had your first attack, what you thought about it – it would help you.’ “ (S.E. II, 128), and the basic justification for the cathartic treatment of the Studies in Freud and Breuer’s “Preliminary Communication”: “For we found, to our great surprize at first, that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing to light the memory of the event memory by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words.“ S.E. II, 6 (italics in original).

Exhibition

Exhibition

Exhibition

Exhibition

Exhibition

“Or Gallery Artists” show at Cold City Gallery, Toronto.

Artists: Reid Shier, Mina Totino, Michelle Normoyle, Stan Douglas, Erin O’Brien, Wendy Dobereiner, Henry Tsang, Phillip McCrum, Nancy Shaw

Review: Canadian Art, Summer 1989 By Scott Watson Now Magazine, June 11-17 1989 by Tom Dean

Exhibition

Exhibition

Catalogue published with text by Phil McCrum

SEEM: A SHORT ESSAY AROUND THE WORK OF RICHARD WILLIAMS
Phillip McCrum

The gallery is a white cube …mere the elements of art are constructed, The Gallery works as courtyard, church, theatre, arcade, located within the recesses and structure of it’s cultural heritage, The viewer can enter, repose, reflect, and exit. The Gallery remains entrenched, receptive, persistent, an articulation of empty desire until filled with the art object. The Gallery is a non-space within a space, invisible and silent, coercive and oppressive, a wilful architecture.

John Locke’s model of the mind, tabula rasa, is like an empty room, blank unimpressed by the experience of sensation. David Hume’s model for perception, abundance of sensations ordered into bundles of experience, much like the way pixels on the T,y’ screen order incoming electronic signals into meaningful images.

“Should 1 ever be placed in a position to exercise control over men, the first character 1 would call upon to stabilize that power would be the architect.”

Clifford Still

The phenomena of persistence is based on the idea that once constructed the architectual form persists on the axis of its development. That is, persistence depends upon a strong plan, a reason for existence, Persistence works through the accumulation of artifact to maintain vitality or becoming exhausted, a permanent sign, an artifact in itself.1

In every city in every urban landscape is the glass box, An elaborate cube that is the pivotal development of the modernist grid, Its cells the continuous repetition of the cube, The White Gallery suppresses history and frees the making of art in the secular shroud of this developed grid, creating a room for ‘everyman’, an ‘ideological space’.

“(Bums are the ideal clients of modern architecture: in perpetual need of shelter and hygiene, real lovers of the sun and the great outdoors, indifferent to architectural doctrine and to formal layout.) “2

The first live broadcast of a televised image occurred in 1939 at the New York World’s Fair, Farnsworth televised the Fairs vision of the ‘City of the Future, Democracity, ‘Democracity’, is…not a dream city but a practical suggestion of how we should be living today, a city of light and of green space as it would appear from 7000 feet’ (according to the official guide book, New York World’s Fair, 1939)3, Television was not available to the consuming public until after the end of the Second World War.

“There are two ways in which the grid functions to declare the modernity of modern art, One is spatial; the other is temporal. In the spatial sense, the grid states the absolute autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is anti-natural, anti-mimetic, anti-real. It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature… In the overall regularity of its organization, it is the result not of imitation but of aesthetic degree, Insofar as its order is that of pure relationship, the grid is a way of abrogating the claims of natural objects to have an order particular to themselves;…the grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic.

In the temporal dimension, the grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one. In that great set of chain reactions by which modernism was born out of the efforts of the 19th century, one final shift resulted in breaking the chain. By “discovering” the grid, Cubism, De Stijl, Mondrian, Malevich…landed in a place that was out of reach of everything that went before. Which is to say, they landed in the present and everything else was declared the past.”4

The Work

As you enter the archway of the gallery you are met with the sight of fourteen vertical units, spaced evenly around the four walls. They stretch from the floor and bend onto the ceiling towards the centre of the gallery space. Their placement divides the space into articulating black and white bands. Each unit is made up of three parts: an almost square base, a longer rectangular middle section and a curved top section. All the sections fit snugly together to form each unit. The units are constructed of gessoed and sanded doorskin, surrounded by cast iron frame. The bases’ surfaces are painted in a bright colour, ranging from yellow-orange to deep orange or red; the image is abstract, with gestural marks of an upward and downward motion. The middle section, predominantly dark has a range in colour from deep blacks and smoky greys to white, resulting in a marblesque surface, The crowning section is collage made up from the texts of several critics and artists, which is then drawn back into and/or burnt.

The overall effect is that of walking into an enclosure. The walls of the gallery, normally invisible under the auspices of the ‘usual’ object of desire, become enhanced, ornamented by the architechtonics of the structure and repetition of the units, The walls become receptive ground, revealed as complacent allies of the darker bands, a kaleidescope of compliant history, Each column supports the tenuous cube: all is a facade, an empty shell, the viewer is alarmed, and despairs. The opulence and the strength is fake, foreboding an impending collapse and doom.

“I think of the need to believe that the world can be made new at each moment, of the need to cut that belief down to size when it threatens to suffocate us: of the blunted edge that results when the belief is cut out all together.“5

The integrated circuit seen close up is, topographical view of a futuristic or ultramodern city; grided, ordered, clean and functional, with no decay or wear, people or history, a perfect instantaneous resolve of the problems of space and time, The Modern goal, of a wilful rejection of the recollection of history6 is collapsed within the acceptance of electromagnetic culture’s size and speed, The control over, and the successful rejection of nature is not achieved in the hard surfaces and minimal structures of modern architecture, but in the silicone and lithographic techniques used in the construction of the microchip.

Footnotes
1. Aldo Rossi, “The Architecture of the city”, (the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England.) 1982, p. 59.
2. Ren Koolhaas, “Delerious New York”, New York, Oxford University Press, 1978, p. 207.
3. Ibid, p. 230.
4. Rosalind Krauss, “Grids, You Say.” Grids, The Pace Gallery, 1978, p. 5,6.
5, Herbert Muschamp, “Ground Up”, Artforum, volume xxvii #5, January 1989, p, 15,
6, David Deiter, “Drawing from Memory” The Art of Memol)’/the Loss of Histol)’, Library of Congress Catalogue, The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, p, 15, In this paper Deiter points out that modernism’s lack of history was a wilful rejection of, not just history, but the recollection of history

Exhibition

Brochure published with text by Alan Wood

Vancouver has the most important element needed in the make-up of any progressive art scene – that is the presence of a determined group of confident, hard-working young artists with talent and vision who have learned how to survive in the city. They do an assortment of jobs, work or live in studios where they are often harassed by city bureaucracy. The object of their strategies is to make their art. It is, therefore, not surprising that their work can often be tough, irreverent and usually hard to sell. These hard-core urban survivors sink most of the money they make back into what they so passionately believe in – their art. I admire them individually and collectively and am gladdened, fortified and encouraged, in my own efforts, by their presence.

Kris Bergthorson is one of these artists, but his work has, in addition, a curiously poetic and ethereal quality. This installation is made up of four fresco-like panels, each one five feet by six feet. First of all plaster of paris is poured into a plywood and lumber mould and water colour paint is applied to the wet plaster surface. The painted slab is then cracked and broken, then re-assembled on new backing, fixed and framed with steel. Bergthorson has given much though to how the four panels will be installed in the gallery space. The central wall holds two panels and each of the two flanking walls hold one panel each. The work will be specifically lit in a subdued environment. The overall effect will be similar to that of approaching an altar or icon in a religious sanctuary. The two central panels are of two figures portrayed from the waist up to just under the nose. The flanking side panels are each painted with a huge simple curved vessel or urn. The figures are obviously and literally male. The two vessels are symbols for the female.

The males figures are covered with tattoos. The female/vessel shapes have elaborate pattern and decoration. The overall colour of all the panels is merely tinted and faded, like very old photographs. The skin of the male bodies is pale, almost bloodless, the urns have a blue translucence or glow. The cracked, fragmentary and re-assembled quality of the surfaces adds to the antique allusion.

The tattoos on the male bodies are based on research that Bergthorson has made on French prison tattoos from the turn of the century, which often illustrate, almost in code, the amount of time served by the convict and the nature of his crimes. These images are combined with tattoos of Bergthoson’s own invention which are somewhat autobiographical. All of these tattoos, therefore, relate to significant information about both the artist and his research subjects. The illusion of the tattoo or graffiti on the body is produced by the impregnation of colour into the plaster surface. A real tattoo is the impregnation of ink into flesh. Real tattoos can only be removed from the body by mutilation but can be easily (and painlessly) removed from the plaster surface by sanding and scarping. The patterns on the urns are not aggressive. They resemble the decorations on Wedgwood pottery or walls of ancient Greece. These vessels also emanate a powerful inner light.

The combined effect of the four juxtaposed panels is to symbolize the fragility of human life. The inside of a person being as vulnerable and fragile as the outside. We are faced with a metaphor for life and a sense of a spiritual search combined with the discovery of an artistic persona.

This work is successful in its honesty and the insight it gives us into Kris Bergthoson’s creative motives and his resolve to make his art poignant and thoughtfully personal through an extraordinary fusion of method and poetry.

-Alan Wood
Vancouver January 1989