未選択

• [PR]
  ×

  [PR]上記の広告は3ヶ月以上新規記事投稿のないブログに表示されています。新しい記事を書く事で広告が消えます。

  • 2025/09/14 13:05
• ３.TIME AND INDEX (3.Time lag)
  3. Time lag

   

    I realised now, interpretation was to read the meaning of index and to imagine the past fact. There is a big time lag. It is like a criminal investigation. They have done murder already. Victim is dead now. The system of perceiving art work except for performance is that we perceive the body as a past. It means we can read the index that is a trace of past action and experience of artist.

   

   However, in case of performance art, we viewers can perceive real artist’s body at real time. Both artist and viewers can share one experience at the same time. It is time present. We can communicate each other, because viewers look artist and artist looks viewers. But in here there is still little time lag exists. Artists always send the message first and viewers perceive it little later and send back his reaction. Good drama makes us feel as if we are experiencing the same time with actor, and feel it as real. We feel pain, feel sad, cry, feel fear,delight and feel happy even though we know it is a fiction = illusion.

   

    I noticed that in this present experience, what we are trying to do is purchasing the experience of actor = subject to correspond to him. In another word, we are trying to complete this time lag. But we can never complete it. This is our desire to get a perfect satisfaction to correspond to our “Mothers”; as Freud says, our very origin. This is a perfect comfort that we lost long time ago. Art work can exist as fetish = substitution. They can supply us and we can get from them only meanings = substitution.

   

    Now it became clear about the structure of Holzer’s rexts. For example of the “Lustmord”, there are four tenses I can point out by index.

   

    1. Past: when the tragedy happened in Bosnia.
    2. Present perfect: Holzer has written this text inspired by this fact.
    3. Present continuous: when we experience her work.
    4. Future: we imagine we may experience such a tragedy in the future.

   

   This is a time lag in context around her texts. There is also a time lag in her text, subject “I” who travel between past, present and future.

   

    I am trying to find the subject of Holzer’ s text. The first question is Who is “I”?

   

    In case of “Laments”(1989)…….12, the texts seem like dreams. There is no judgement. The scene changes without relations. Everything is ambiguous. Vision starts from death and then travels to body, skin, sex, hole, fire, water and the space. There are 10 chapters: voices of adults, two chapters: voices of children and one chapter: voice of an infant, and the subjects are always “I”, except for chapter 5; it is “You”there.

   

    The first chapter “I” causes present action such as “I GO”, “I DO”, “I PUT”, “I SPIT”, “I THINK”, “I WANT”. The second chapter, “I” is future tense and shows intention; “I WILL”. The third and forth chapters, they are present actions and thought; “I LEARN”, “I HAVE”, “I COUGH”, “I CONSIDER”, “I DO”, “I NEED”, “I LOVE”, “I WANT”. The 6 th chapter, “I” travels past to present such as ; “I WAS”, “I WATCHED”, “I CLOSED”, “I FORMED”, then, “I AM”, “I STOP”, “I GIVE”, “I WANT”. In the 7 th chapter, the subject “I” travels from present to past and come back to present.

   

    By Syu Kishida, Japanese psychologist, time is a human’s invention. When human cannot satisfy his desire (present), he invented “past” as when he was suppressed his completed desire and “future” as when he may complete his desire again and “present”, now he is never satisfied.₃₂

   

    This notion clarifies that in above 4 tenses around “Lustmord”, past and future are invented by viewers in present. Future is obvious, but also past. Because nobody knows that what happened in Bosnia. We only imagine from the indexes. History is a viewpoint of someone in present. There are many different aspects possible.

   

    However this is a touch between language and real world through the sign, index. Besides, the subject of her texts “I” is shifter as well, (changeable by a viewer). All of these are changeable. The only basic point is a viewer’s present experience.

   

    I think these “I”s are different, but are mixing in the text. The subject travels among present and future freely and also travel between “you” and “I”, adults and children. This is a vision of dream. It seems to have a body, but it does not make sound, does not speak. It does not scream when it must have a strong pain such as a knife cut its body. In the 5 th chapter subject “You” do not speak, do not have intention, do not think. Somebody is looking at “You”. “You” is written as an actor and also as a viewer. Two subjects are mixing in one subject. This double meaning implies our unconscious.₃₃

   

    There is a full of silence all around her texts. Only God’s voice keeps same calm tone. It emphasises the seeing and keeps same speed of ongoing vision of dream. Another subject (“second subject”) is dreaming and looking at the subject “I” (“first subject”). The “second subject” may have a body, but it does not work, it is sleeping. And the “first subject” seems not to have real body. It does not feel pain, it never speaks, it never dies in the dream. Because it is an imagination of the “second subject”.

   

    It is more obvious in her least series; “Lustmord”. This text is written (spoken) by 3 different subjects (viewpoint) “I” (victim, perpetrator, observer), but these 3 “I”s also cross each other.

   

    Common points of these 3 are body-less (no pain) and no judgement. Only “perpetrator” is moving (has action). In here both “victim” and “observer” are looking at the “perpetrator”. “Perpetrator” is doing his action feeling two gazes.

   

    However, text does not describe why he does so. It is no reason and no restriction. Here is also another subject who is looking these 3 people in her (?) dream and sometimes get into them. In the last two sentences of the last text “OBSERVER”; “I WALK OUTSIDE”, “I ATAND WHEN THEY LIFT HER” symbolises that the “first subject” goes out from his/her dream and the “second subject” wakes up from the nightmare because these are the only actions of “I” in this text. This is just the moment that the “first subject” and the “second subject” cross each other, and this also symbolises that dream = surreal and real world can touch just at this moment.
  
  

   

           Notes
  

  ₃₂ Syu Kishida / Origin of Time and Space: Lazy Phychoanalysis / Chuo koron sya (Japan) 1982 pp173-181# ₃₃ Refer to Freud and Lacan: We are separating in two, conscious and unconscious. There is a gap that we never be able to fill up between “I”whom I think in my mind and “I”whom I find in others’ view. Unconscious is what we never see in our minds.

  
   
   
  
  PR
  • 未選択
  • 2015/08/01 15:28
  • 0
• ３.TIME AND INDEX (4. New subject)

  
  

  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.)

  • 未選択
  • 2015/08/06 16:17
  • 0
• Epilogue: Virtual reality

  Virtual reality

   

   When I watched Holzer’s work at Toyota Municipal Museum of Art₃₈in Japan (Apr. 1996), I felt as if it were living. However it did not make sound. There were full of silence. It forced me not to stop reading the texts against the tiredness of my eyes. I felt pain (stimulation) in my eyes, but had a jouissance. It was a special experience of me to be in front of one work so long time that I never had.

   

  I tried to find out her body, but I could not. I stopped seeking it because I knew she had never expressed her body in her work. But I found that her work specially LED representation seemed to have a body; it was a body as virtual reality, but not Holzer. And at the same time, I noticed her work was a mirror that reflects our real world and me. It is the time when we should do something for the world now. Because what I looked from her work’s reflection was the crisis of the human (me as well).

   

  17 th . April 1996, a Japanese newspaper₃₉ introduced the article that announces the appearance of a virtual idol star to the media. “Now, by the spread of inter-net, imaginary shopping street and government only on the computer come into topics. As a fact, the virtual idol star will appear in any media next month. By the development of computer graphics technology, the field of virtual reality spread out surprisingly in these couple of years. The border line between real and fantasy become ambiguous more and more. But even it improves, it is only an assumption and imagination of the world. It has a danger of taking confusing to operate information because we easily forget the differences. ”

   

  “She has a body (as a stimulation), voice, name and background. “DK96” was born at Fussa, Tokyo; is sixteen years old high school girl, 163 cm hight, grown up at US base and good at English and Dance.”

   

  “In case of inter-net and personal computer, man can act a woman and we can change our “name”. It is possible to establish an imaginary myself.”₄₀

   

  What virtual reality shows is that this exists only by a lot of signs. However we notice that we (human) also consist of these signs. Although human also has something out of sign. We have “bodies”.

   

  We cannot escape from the contemporary world where we live. We should know what is going on now, and should think about our existence and the future vision of our world to maintain our lives as human.

   

  
  

  Notes

  ₃₈ Placed Toyota, Aichi, Japan Opened Nov. 1995  ref. BT May. 1996 / Bijutsu syuppan (Japan) pp51-58# ₃₉ Light and Shadow of Virtual Reality: Chunichi-Shinbun, 17 th. Apr. 1996 (Japan)# ₄₀ Ibid. p9#   (# translated in English by myself. BT=Bijutsu Techo, monthly art magazine)

   

    

     

   

  • 未選択
  • 2015/08/06 18:20
  • 0
• Bibliography

  Bibliography
  
  

  1.INTRODUCTION TO SEMIOTICS / Yoshihiko Ikegami / Iwanami (Japan) 1984 # 2.WORD AND IMAGE / Norman Bryson / Cambridge 1981 3.BT JAN. 1996: The sign called Painting-Norman Bryson / Masayuki Tanaka, Michiro Hayashi / Bijutsu syuppan (Japan) # 4.JENNY HOLZER / Michael Auping / New York universe 1992 5.VISION AND PAINTING: The logic of the Gaze / Norman Bryson / New Haven and London 1983 6.CAMERA LUCIDA / Roland Barthes translated by Richard Howard, La Cambre Claire, English / London, Vintage 1982 (1980) 7. PLEASURE OF THE TEXT / Roland Barthes translated by Richard Miller, Le Plaisir du texte, English / Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1975 (1973)

  8. BT  DEC. 1994: Jenny Holzer / Hiroshi Minamishima / Bijutsu syuppan (Japan) # 9. REVUE DE LA PENSEE  D’AUJOURD’HUI vol. 9-8 Lacan / Jacques Lacan et al. / Seido-sya (Japan) 1981 # 10. THE ORIGINALITY OF THE AVANT –GARDE  AND  OTHER  MODERNIST  MYTHS / Rosalind E.Krauss / Cambridge, Massachusetts 1985 11. BT  FEB. 1996: Cross Over Modernism – Rosalind Krauss, Art History Now / Masayuki Tanaka, Michio Hayashi / Bijutsu syuppan（Japan）# 12. LAMENTS / Jenny Holzer / Dia Art Foundation 1989 13. LAZY PHYCHOANALYSIS  Syu Kishida / Chuo koron sya (Japan) 1982 # 14. CHUNICHI-SHINBUN 17th Apr. 1996 : Light and Shadow of Virtual Reality / (Japanese Newspaper) #

   

   

   

  ※This thesis was presented by the author as a dissertation for the degree of MA at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, The　London Institute in 1996.    

  • 未選択
  • 2015/08/06 18:24
  • 0