4.    New subject  

    

As Freud said, dream is our unconscious, and Lacan added that “unconscious has a structure such as a language.”₃₄ It is an escape from our real society (code) and all the conflicts become system (have meanings ) by code. What makes them meaningful is language.

 

“Unconscious is a thought that escapes from the thought by language which is always under attention of our gaze without sleeping.”₃₅

 

Holzer’s texts, in one word, are surreal poems. However as surrealism clarified the reality of our unconscious, her texts also take us to tha field of unconscious. By her exaggerated theatricality (dramatic, religious and ritual presentation) made it ambiguous the border line between dream and real world. Additionally, various public presentations such as posters, made it ambiguous the border line between real world and fiction (art). In “Truisms” she made it unclear the subject, whether her voice or the public announcement. We are trying to find out her body, but to look for artist’s body is also one of the gaze by means of art history, it is not necessary for art essentially.

 

What I have found by my interpretation that is my individual, subjective, creative action was a “new subject” (the second subject) who is sleeping and watching dream and also who created the subject “I” instead of Holzer’s body. So that, who is that? In fact, it was me, myself. Because the subject who is dreaming does not exist in fact. It is established by viewer’s imagination (creation), not created by Holzer. (She only produced.) And then, I noticed that it was myself who was re-experiencing the stimulation and jouissance of the subject and was looking at the subject of the text “I”.

 

By Lacan’s notion; “mirror stage” – the third stage, “a baby recognises the image on mirror as a reflection of himself.”₃₆ This situation is similar to this process. At first I perceive Holzer’s text as an experience in real world by the subject “I”, and secondly I notice it is a fiction that another subject is looking at her (?) in his/her dream. And finally I found that the subject who was looking at the subject “I” was the reflection on mirror of myself.

 

There is also a lag between the “mirror reflection” and me. By Lacan, we are looking at ourselves as a reflection on everything in the world. This is the way of seeing. But there is a gap between the real world and the image on mirror. We can never fill this gap, we can never correspond to our “Mother” again.

 

When we look at Holzer’s work, her work makes us aware that we are communicating physically to not a human but a virtual image (language itself) that does not have any form (body). Dramas supply us an illusion as a substitution of the real, but on the contrary Holzer indicated us illusion as an illusion, because the actor is not human, it is language. Her work showed the gap we can never fill, between the world where we are living (signification, fantasy) and real world, the fear that language and technology can control our bodies (this is real). She refused my sweet desire to correspond to Mother at last and supplied me “new god” instead, but finally I noticed that “new god” was me. Language (sign) brought me to the real world again. What I experienced was the time trip in a day dream.

 

To bring unconscious to the conscious is a work to escape from the field of meaning and then bring what we experienced and found there to the field of meaning again. For that, we must reconstruct the new code and establish new level on the field of meaning. This is to say the cultural revolution; the culture that Claude Levi-strauss defined, “Culture is thought as the whole body of symbolic systems. And language, marriage system, economics, art, science, religion are at the most front.”₃₇ It is nothing others than culture =sign.

 

Now, I finally reached the answer of my question; Why did she strictly avoid showing her body in her work? There are two answers. One is to establish a new subject like a God. If she presented her body, it broke this trick. However another one, I suggest is, that it is because of her gaze: her desire to escape from her gaze, it has also a personal side. She must want to be free from cultural, social, historical and her personal everything that makes her existence. After she escaped from them, there was nothing except for language.

 

    Notes
 

₃₄ op.cit The languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, p32 ₃₅ Ibid. p33# ₃₆ op.cit Linguistic Structure of Unconscious, p58# “at first baby perceive the image on mirror as a real figure of the other and secondly he understands it is a reflection and finally he knows it is his reflection.” ₃₇ Catherine B Clement / L’imaginarie, le symbolique et le reel, in La Psychanalyse / Librarie Larousse 1976, (translated by Hiroshi Iwasaki, Japanese), op.cit Revue de la Pensee d’aujourd’hui Vol.9-8 Lacan, p198# (He quoted from Levi-strauss, but did not make sure where it came from.)