Art School

Robyn Adler

The artist’s gaze upon psychoanalysis could be discussed by considering the experience of “art school”. No less than any other university degree, the title of Bachelor of Fine Art is conferred to those who earn the degree with “the sweat of one’s brow”, as Lacan said in Seminar XVI.[i] Lacan here is critical of the transmission of knowledge by the university, a knowledge reducible to commodifiable ‘units of value’ divorced from truth.

Like any other discipline, art is, well, a discipline. Artists don’t spring up in the world, born artists. There is no origin of the artist as much as there is no Origine du Monde except as a painted artifice, an origin lost and veiled behind curtains.[ii] It takes labour to produce artworks, a slow and often silent practice of working and reworking through. Art school is by no means immune from the criticisms of the university reforms that Lacan took up as long ago as 1968, but there are a few things that stand out as exceptional in art education. I will take up only one here: the practice, in drawing classes, of working with negative space. 

It used to be compulsory to attend drawing class at art school whether you were a painter, a sculptor, or a printmaker. These days, art students increasingly do without it and the focus of art schools seems unabashedly to produce market ready ‘creatives’. But for those who did or still do recall the whole day of standing in front of an easel in order to draw not what you see, but what is not there, the negative space between objects, may recall the euphoria – mixed with exhaustion and blunted charcoal-stained fingers – upon leaving the classroom and seeing not forms themselves, but the negative space between them dancing along and between the edges. Nothing but the fine line chiselled by an eraser separating one passenger on the train home from the next; marvelling over the absolute beauty of a shape formed by the space between a nose that would never make it to the cover of a magazine and the spectacles balanced upon it.

Drawing negative space puts one in a relation with the hole opened up by the failure of knowledge. Drawing negative space draws the eyes to scraps that exist between things and that cannot be assigned a value. Opposing knowledge as the work of the university that confers degrees, Lacan introduced knowledge with the object a, however Lacan noted that “the object a is much better at making love to the specular image it perforates, than at animating the whirlwind it gives rise to as surplus jouissance”.[iii] Knowledge comes in a flash – what makes one work is truth, all the more evident as it is painful.[iv] The work of truth involves a confrontation with surplus jouissance that arises with the failure of knowledge: “the jouissance of the woman from whom he is born – to undo it; in other words, to refind the hole, at long last vivid, of castration from where woman arises truthful (véridique)”.[v]

Like the title of Lacan’s unpublished piece D’une réforme dans son trou (Of a reform in its hole), intended for the newspaper Le Monde to address university reforms, in particular the teaching of psychiatry, art school is an experience of reforming the hole. Rather than being reduced to the stain in the picture or confined to asylum like places where society would put its discordant members, perhaps the artist’s practice is a reforming of the remains of castration as scraps to do something with.[vi] This is a doing something with one’s hands, much like Lacan’s examples of riding a horse or learning to ski[vii] - a savoir faire.

References

[i] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI, From an Other to the other.” Ed. J.-A., Miller, Trans. B. Fink. Cambridge: Polity, 2023, p.173.

[ii] Courbet, G., L’Origine du Monde, 1866, Collection Musée d’Orsay, Currently on display until May 27, 2024, as part of Lacan, l'exposition, Centre Pompidou-Metz.

[iii] Lacan, J., D’une réforme dans son trou, La Cause du Desir 98, 2018, p.12. [Unpublished in English, Blog Team Translation]

[iv] Cf. Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI, op.cit., p. 173.

[v] Lacan, J., D’une réforme dans son trou, op.cit., p.12.

[vi] Lacan, J., Ibid., p.11.

[vii] Lacan, J., The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVI, op.cit., p.173.