The Secret Lives of Objects
Jane's book, The Secret Lives of Objects, will be published on
13th March, 2008.
It will be available from trafford.com
as a real book and a digital download, both priced at £25.
Click here to view a synopsis
of the individual papers featured in the book.
Synopsis
Prelude
This book looks at objects from a perspective derived from psychoanalytical
practice as well as the practice of art/design. I have brought
together a number of papers. About a third have already been published
(although I have sometimes used a later version.) Others have
been presented at conferences or as lectures. Most, I have originally
written for my own personal pleasure – even when they have
ended in a published version. All these texts make use of the
methodology of free association (as used in the consulting room).
I have avoided references. For texts, such as these, which hover
somewhere between the academic, the essay and fiction, references
seem a regrettable distraction. And in line with this kind of
thinking, ignoring their dates of origin, I am transferring them
from a diachronic system into a synchronic practice, which oversees
the whole. One could see this as a panopticon tower regularly
installed in prisons in the nineteenth century which allowed for
surveillance and separation. (Prisoners were not allowed to meet.)
But I would be much happier to think of my texts as a rotating
mirror ball reflecting the pulsing disco light system, which represent
the shifting perceptions of my own experience of objects. The
objects I have chosen to write about have no particular status
as aesthetic objects. Nor am I myself a maker of objects. But
the dialectic between making and psychoanalytical practice gives
us a new perspective on the object. The objects I describe are
in the mind, be they jugs, beast costumes, desiring machines,
photo albums or whatever. To support this I have largely made
use of the method of free association which I outline at several
points. The papers are discrete. They stand alone. This inevitably
leads to a certain amount of unavoidable repetition. These repetitions
serve as leit-motifs which haunt the text. Sometimes they are
noisy; sometimes a mere ripple of sound. Their underground rumble
resembles the way that prisoners in total isolation still find
the means to communicate. But sometimes silence is best. In my
final paper ‘The death of the photo album’ I end up
with an empty page. [Jane Graves 2008]
Introduction
What is the object’s secret?
I approach the ‘secret’ of an object from a double
perspective. My twin practices as a cultural studies lecturer
and a psychoanalytical psychotherapist stimulated my search for
the object’s ‘secret’. I see my patients alone
in my consulting room, and this isolation is essential for patients
to tolerate the process of change and discovery – which
tells them they were not quite as they thought. I isolate the
object in a similar way, and stripping it of familiar associations,
it becomes strange to me, just as my patients become strange to
themselves. But the art/design college focussed me primarily on
the making process rather than the responsive process. All artists/designers
must acquire skills; but at the root of all creative practice,
there is an intuition. This intuition can then be sustained by
a systematic exploration of the possibilities implicit in the
original concept. To guide me through this creative maze I have
turned to Freud’s dream theory. He identifies three strategies,
condensation, displacement and symbolisation which convert the
disturbing wishes of the unconscious into a form acceptable to
the dream censor – and pleasurable to the dreamer. To me
these three strategies are essential to understand the indirect
nature of the creative process – as long as they are unconscious.
They are also the defence strategy which allows the artist to
get lost in her/his own mind - to engage with the rhythm of the
body, heart, blood, breath, which utilises the orifices of the
body, in particular the mouth, the anus and the phallus. These
primal erotic zones link us to the pulsating erotic desires, which
can never be fully satisfied. We must renounce the fantasy of
total fulfilment to fully engage with the creative process. Mourning
is the basis of creativity – as it is of the creatively
lived life. Approaching the individual object this way allows
us a temporary escape from the plethora of objects, which make
up our daily world. Trapping an object in a peepshow box is an
opportunity to illuminate its singularity. [Jane Graves 2008]
Click here to view a synopsis
of the individual papers featured in the book.
