Artist Statement

“The unconscious is not a reservoir of wild drives that has to be conquered by the ego, but the site from which a traumatic truth speaks… not ‘the ego should conquer the id,’ the site of the unconscious drives, but ‘I should dare approach the site of my truth.’'  What awaits me ‘there’ is not a deep Truth I have to identify with, but an unbearable truth I have to learn to live with.” – Slavoj Zizek, Absolute Recoil

A common notion regarding abstract art and the unconscious is that of the painter-as-patient in which the automatic activity of, say, Jackson Pollock style drip painting is understood to be a direct analogy to the patient being analyzed on the psychiatrist’s couch; that the creation of an abstract painting is a stream-of-consciousness (much like the patient-on-the-couch who makes random verbal associations that the psychiatrist interprets) that defies logic, and “taps in to” the unconscious.

Pollock was keen to point out that he was never not in control of his process, but the broader collective imagination seemed to be incapable of understanding why an artist would do such a thing if he or she were not in a trance-like state.

Zizek returns to the pre-WWI scene of the original transgression by way of the composer Arthur Schoenberg, and demonstrates that the collective consciousness of the Western World has been in denial of the reality of the unconscious ever since the catastrophic, and collectively traumatic, early 20th century total war.  Zizek reverses the historical narrative, and puts the artist in the role of the analyst whose “patient” (the collective imagination of the Western World) has been traumatized in to denial.

Zizek’s aim, not explicitly stated, is to return agency to the artist.

Abstract art is a way to “approach the site” of trauma – individual or collective – with agency in determining how to position oneself in relation to the trauma rather than to simply be held captive by its effects.  It traces the contours of the unconscious, and reveals the logic of certain innate mechanisms that, according to Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, cannot be expressed in language.

Josh Whipkey, 2019