Full Description
Often derided as unscientific and self-indulgent, psychoanalysis has been an invaluable resource for artists, art critics and historians throughout the twentieth century. Art and Psychoanalysis investigates these encounters. The shared relationship to the unconscious, severed from Romantic inspiration by Freud, is traced from the Surrealist engagement with psychoanalytic imagery to the contemporary critic's use of psychoanalytic concepts as tools to understand how meaning operates. Following the theme of the 'object' with its varying materiality, Walsh develops her argument that psychoanalysis, like art, is a cultural discourse about the mind in which the authority of discourse itself can be undermined, provoking ambiguity and uncertainty and destabilising identity. The dynamics of the dream-work, Freud's 'familiar unfamiliar', fetishism, visual mastery, abjection, repetition, and the death drive are explored through detailed analysis of artists ranging from Max Ernst to Louise Bourgeois, including 1980s postmodernists such as Cindy Sherman, the performance art of Marina Abramovic' and post-minimalist sculpture.Innovative and disturbing, Art and Psychoanalysis investigates key psychoanalytic concepts to reveal a dynamic relationship between art and psychoanalysis which goes far beyond interpretation. There is no cure for the artist - but art can reconcile us to the traumatic nature of human experience, converting the sadistic impulses of the ego towards domination and war into a masochistic ethics of responsibility and desire.
Contents
Chapter 1 Distortion and DisguiseChapter 2 Uncanny Eruptions 22-35Chapter 3 Refashioning Fetishism and the Masquerade 36-47Chapter 4 Female Fetishism in the Expanded Field 48-57Chapter 5 Eye and Gaze: Restoring Body to Vision 58-71Chapter 6 The Evolution of Abjection72-85Chapter 7 Black Narcissus 86-98 Chapter 8 Repetition and the Death Drive 99-110Chapter 9 Returning to Melanie Klein 111-121Chapter 10 'Real-Making': A Transitional Phenomenon 122-132Chapter 11 New Skins for Old 133-143
