It is just the opposite with the artistic productions of Lucien Freud.
If Freud (as the grandson of Sigmund Freud) is the painter par excellence of the death of the psychoanalytic subject, that means that his art is a screen-effect, a truth-sayer, of the disappearance of the famous reality-principle of the unconscious in the postmodern condition. In Freud's artistic productions, the postmodern subject is represented as inert and evacuated, actually imploded with such intensity that the body serves as a tomb for a postmodern self which does not exist.
In many of Freud's paintings, and particularly in those featured in the recent retrospective of his work at the Beaubourg in Paris, his portraits of the feminine subject push the conventional symptomology of the modernist psychoanalytic subject to its point of excess, and then collapse: hysteria (the portrait of his first wife who, with exaggerated eyes always gazing outwards, quietly strangles the cat); compulsion-repetition (Freud always paints one picture - supine women in suppressed silence staring blankly into white space); displacement and projection (friend with rat); and an intense and unresolved mother fixation coupled with a determined reduction of womenly subjects to "girls."
Here, we are left with a serial scene of vacant subjects, isolated, supine, silenced, their gaze turned outwards: not as some have claimed a recovery of anguished human identity, but just the opposite - cancelled identities to such a degree of compulsion that their bodies actually implode, resurfacing finally as blank screens. Indeed, if the Freudian subject can possess such blank identities and if the symptomology of the painting can be so banal, maybe that is because the Freudian subject no longer exists except as an artistic echo, a painterly image-reservoir, of an already vacated subjectivity. Not then the unconscious any longer, but the full publicization of the collapsing subject. Not dream states, but disembodied dreams as the prevailing sign of postmodern psychosis. And not even a subject any longer, but a memory trace onto which are inscribed all of the cultural signs of the end of the psychoanalytic subject: painterly mothers, strangled cats, friends with rats, women as girls, and always the intense, unresolved and compulsive fixation with the mother figure. The common point: not Freudian psychoanalysis, but the implosion of the Freudian subject into Bataille's history of the eye with its erotics unto death. Probably against his own intentions, Lucien Freud has produced a brilliant parody of the limitations, and neurotic fixations, of the psychoanalytic subject. In his work, the unconscious moves outside the body, and the blank stare of all his painterly subjects is left as a necessary social remainder of the reduction of the self to a mirrored-image of the psycho-simulacrum.
While Bacon may paint the fully exploded body, the organ which is turned inside out and and splayed across the postmodern social terrain, Freud paints the hermetic body, the body which implodes into the silence of non-identity. A distressed and emblematic sign of the end-point of the psychoanalytic subject, Freud fully explores the ruins within. Indeed, in his art, even the quality of the oilpaint changes over the years, from light colors and smooth quality in his early works to mottled skin colors and rough, raised oils in his later works. It is as if the text of the canvas begins to crack apart, and to speak in the geography of its colors and textures of the reality of the ruins within. Not so much the ruins of the womanly subjects in these paintings, but the degree-zero of the panic male vision which is represented in all of its melancholy brilliance and aridity in the artistic productions of Lucien Freud. |
