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Content
A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF The Graduate School
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Fine Arts
August 1995
Copyright 1995 Leonard Bravo
UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7
This thesis, written by
under the direction of h.X.S....Thesis Committee,
and approved by all its members, has been pre
sented to and accepted by the Dean of The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
M P & rea s o f F ^ e : A k t s
DtdH
THESIS COMMITTEE
ii
Body of Paper
Notes
Bibliography
Table of Contents
pp. 1-13
pg. 14
pg. 15
1
Throughout my work I have always been interested in sites or spaces that defy
definition. By sites or spaces I mean, social, cultural, psychological, or bodily
realms, all of which encompass spheres of hum an cognition. I am fascinated
by anything that defies recognition, slips through the cracks , disrupts
meanings, supersedes knowledge. Anything that somehow jettisons our
symbolic order, an order that is formed by our entry into language in our
infancy, and which informs the construction of a subjective identity. I feel
restricted by language, the way it codifies and classifies our existence, forcing
us into a structured symbolic order, where everything is rationalized and
categorized, systematized into a dialectical order which stresses binary
oppositions. Through these systems we assume that we can understand and
control cognitive experience, while relegating the undefinable into the realms
of the exotic, uncontrollable, alien, and "other". It is these limiting
assumptions that are the starting point behind the investigations of my work,
and from which I've sought an escape or release from throughout my art
making.
As stated, I gravitate towards that, which disrupts our symbolic order,
those forms or expressions which are considered to be (the) marginal, (the)
deviant, l(the) abject, (the) aberrant, and various other conditions that might
be thought of as forms of resistance, since they are thought to exist well
outside the discourse of the established order. In my work I have dealt with
my attraction tow ards these transgressive areas, earnestly believing they offer
sites of escape from an omnipresent symbolic order, but ultimately grappling
with a sense of loss.
2
This loss is incurred as these forms of resistance are inevitably absorbed and
defused, failing to truly offer an uncodified site. But it is exactly this failure
that stands at the crux of the work. My attem pt to extract currency from
these failed wrecks, (the glorified attempts at transcending the established
order, unable to transcend language as they are), is the pivot on which my
work oscillates. Merely the fact that these sites exist, (that they resist a type of
definition, laden with baggage as they may be, and relegated to a marginal,
desublimated role), confers them w ith meaning and currency for me. This
doubling of meaning, where the sign is loaded with both its meaning
(essence) and also its redundancy (cliche), is what truly interests me. A band
such as Led Zeppelin for example, which became a parody through its
pseudo- mystical approach to heavy rock, settling for a bloated, portentous,
ghost of their gloried past, does not diminish its capacity to exist as catalysts
for transformation and transcendence. This is the doomed enterprise that I
grapple with, trying to find significance from "transgressive" sites that can
only exist within language. Inherently part of the very symbolic order they
are constantly trying to transcend and transgress, therefore, reaffirming the
dialectical structures of binary oppositions.
Throughout my work I have dealt with these issues in a num ber of ways.
I've investigated different aspects of these issues through various formal
approaches, such as, the overlaying of icons and symbols on abstract fields,
figurative descriptions of animals and children, and pure abstract, painterly
surfaces.
3
In a recent piece, For Those Closer to the Source, 1995, a wall m ounted
installation consisting of different elements using painting, text, and photo
based images, I've attem pted to bring together three separate ideas in order to
create a narrative link through which one can better read the work. But these
formal ideas or concepts (painting, text, and image) are merely fragments,
signifiers of larger individual narratives, which are allowed to be read
through each other, each fragm ent building up the relationship to the next.
In the construct of this installation, I've tried to explore certain tangents of my
conceptual concerns, to hopefully create a richer and more complex approach
to some of these ideas.
The installation itself was of particular concern to me, as the placement of
each element (photo-image, text, painting) in relation to the other, dictated
the way in which the viewer created visual and textual connections. One of
my impulses with this arrangem ent was to approximate the feeling of the
salon or private study, a room where one might have a selection of objects
that have significant meaning attached to them, available for one's perusal.
A collection of fragments which embody certain fetishistic qualities, which
not only allow for these objects to exist in a purely material form but also
attem pt to reassign and reinterpret signification through a dispersal of
meaning. In fact my whole enterprise might be fetishistic, as I'm not simply
trying to find essence, or even to deny it, I'm also hying to animate the
wrecked corpus of a signification long deemed bankrupt. In the story Against
the Grain (A Rebours) by J.K. Huysmans, described by many as the greatest
novel of the "decadent experience", the hero, des Esseintes, is cloistered from
4
society in a cottage where he leads a herm it like existence. In his seclusion he
spends his time in a feverish quest to experience reveries from the objects and
possessions he obsessively collects.
The book is basically a compendium of the hum an experience from a most
deranged and decadent perspective. It is this somewhat alternate reality,
which the book goes into such depths to describe, that I'm draw n towards:
He left his books, wiped his forehead and m ade for the dining room,
telling himself that among all the volumes he had been arranging on his
shelves, the works of Barbey d'Aurevilly were still the only ones whose
m atter and style offered those gamey flavours, those stains of disease and
decay, that cankered surface, that taste of rotten-ripeness which he so loved to
savour among the decadent writers, Latin and Monastic, of the early ages. 1
This perversion, or depravation of sensory experience, this abnormal
preoccupation with the need to signify, and the constant deferral of an
ultimately sublime experience, are some of the concerns that come up in the
book for me, and which relate to some of my current and past work. In some
of my paintings from a couple of years ago I was draw n to images of animals,
primates and bats, that signified a lost nature, a nature as fetish and object.
These animals floated on surfaces of swirling colors, varnished with a high
gloss seal, as if they'd been preserved as an amber sealed relic. The works
dealt with our longing for, and loss of, nature, and our need to denaturalize
it, objectify and fetishize it. They attem pted to represent a moribund need to
preserve the token, the fetish, the approxim ation of that "nature", but never
quite being able to make a connection to nature, only a sublimated
preservation of it.
5
Therefore in des Esseintes' decadent preoccupations, I find a similar
condition, as he creates an artifice of nature, by enshrining and mummifying
it, albeit an artifice that allows him to transgress so called normal states of
behavior. It is not only this quest for enlarged experience and new sensations,
but also the accouterments of the story itself, that fascinates me. I completely
embrace this loaded construct of the m an of letters immersed in a feverish,
hallucinatory state, the rarefied dandy consumed by his obsessions. The idea
of somebody lost in melancholic reveries, although a romantic and
som ewhat antiquated construct, offers me a model still ripe w ith possibilities
to explore.
These concepts are very m uch in vein w ith the notion of allegory, as stated by
Craig Owens in his well known essay "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a
Theory of Postmodernism":
Allegory is consistently attracted to the fragmentary, the imperfect, the
incomplete— an affinity which finds its most comprehensive expression in
the ruin, which Benjamin identified as the allegorical emblem par excellence.
Here the works of m an are reabsorbed into the landscape; ruins thus stand for
history as an irreversible process of dissolution and decay, a progressive
distancing from origin: 2
It is this allegorical impulse to reference, to find meaning in the double read,
to create signification out of fragments, which relates to the presentation of
my current work. I see this as somewhat of a parallel to the ruminations of
des Esseintes in his cloistered existence, letting each object become a reverie,
full of allegorical associations and references under the gaze of the
melancholic eye.
6
Through my wall installation, I allude to this allegorical impulse by setting
up a system of fragmentary signification that dem ands to be deciphered.
The text pieces used in the installation, are purposely w ritten from the point
of view of somebody having a profound, revelatory experience. They all
share a sense of urgency in tone, and are m eant to be seen as temporal
fragments of a larger narrative, although they function as individual stories
as well. The text emulates the voices of a particular cultural framework, that
is the narrative descriptions of mystical, transcendental experiences,
descriptions of m ind altering, drug induced, esoteric pursuits, usually existing
on the fringes of culture and relegated to ridiculed sub-genres. I'm draw n to
these peripheries because of the obsessive thread they all share. These voices
are unshakeable in steadfastly believing their own rhetoric, while staking out
"dubious" terrains of knowledge. There is a naivete combined with a sense of
extremity that generates an interpolation of meaning. Oblivious to a rational
and objective frame of mind, occult and mystical pursuits have offered a
space where a more subjective, irrational approach can exist, while also
allowing for a tendency to engender charlatans and dupes who m anipulate its
symbolic baggage.
The text pieces therefore riff from a genre that has been well documented and
pursued; authors such as Aldous Huxley, Robert Anton Wilson, Alistair
Crowley, Bryon Gysin, Joseph Conrad, are all writers who were involved in a
feverish, obsessive pursuit for a truth that might just be outside the
boundaries of everyday cognition.
7
But although I've consistently adm ired this type of writing, I also look at it
from a removed point of view, seeing as how most of these writings have
become the cultural baggage of a contrived parody: "the search for
enlightenment", reduced to mass consumption through the homilies of the
"New Age"cottage industry. Even though this material has been
marginalized to the fringes of our cultural experience, it is within these
loaded narratives that I find a place that allows transcendence serving as a
release point from the norm while also acknowledging its condition as a
cultural cliche. Again, I'm interested in that slippery terrain where the sign
might carry some of its "essence", as well as, allowing its signification as
cliche. In a piece like:
I swear IEs out there,
I've seen it!!
as my pulse quickened,
I shouted,
gasping for air, bones
aching, shivering...
I'd finally crossed over,
came out on the other side,
found the astral link,
nothing was ever the same...
I hope to evoke a sense of desperation within a very short format, each line
building upon the last one, creating a sense of tension, but never quite
8
delivering the final outcome. I w ant the reader to read between the lines and
visualize his/her own narrative. I'm interested in the text inhabiting a space
devoid of irony or detachment, steadfastly believing its own m yth making, at
the same time frustrating the reader in his/her efforts to truly ascertain it as
factual, because of our natural pessimism and distrust, built up over decades
of failed illusions, lost ideals, and the ability of language to dissipate and
sublimate any form of transcendence.
Another theme that I'm interested in is the subject of "the Uncanny", one
of the key sources being an essay of the same name by Sigmund Freud from
1919. It's interesting to note that at the time Freud wrote this essay Europe
had just come out of the most horrific, bloodiest, senseless carnage that had
been experienced up to that point, which left western intellectuals m istrustful
and uncertain about their civilization. In the essay, Freud defines the
uncanny as related to what is frightening, and to what arouses dread &
horror. He finds the uncanny to inhabit a special core of feeling through
which we can distinguish certain things which lie within the field of
frightening. He notes that "the uncanny is that class of the frightening which
leads back to w hat is known of old and long familiar"3 Anthony Vidler in
the introduction to his The Architectural Uncanny , referring to the short
stories of E. T. A. Hoffman, and Poe: "Its favorite motif was precisely the
contrast between a secure and homely interior and the fearful invasion of an
alien presence; on a psychological level, its play was one of doubling, where
the other is, strangely enough, experienced as a replica of the self, all the more
fearsome because apparently the same." 4
9
Personally I see the uncanny as a destabilizing agent, disrupting traditional
notions of centrality by becoming a site or space that dislodges the syntax of
symbolic order. The uncanny can be the slippage that occurs in a m oment of
true recognition, a moment filled with horror, as we gaze for the first time
into a new moment of cognition, both new and familiar. Freud talks about
the German w ord "unheimlich", the opposite of "heimlich", and the
complex significations of these two words. "Heimlich" carries a whole range
of meanings from; homely, belonging to house, familiar, intimate, friendly,
all theway to; concealed, kept from sight, hidden. For example to do
something heimlich is "behind someone's back". The different sets of
meaning in the word, encompass its opposite or duality, thus Freud deduces,
that this extension of meaning is nothing more than a repression. The
uncanny, like its root word heimlich, being nothing new or alien, but rather
w hat's been kept hidden and has come to light. Its meaning residing all along
within the param eters of the word. Freud says "Thus heimlich is a w ord the
meaning of which develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally
coincides w ith its opposite, unheimlich. Unheimlich is in some way or other
a sub-species of heimlich." 5
Freud also identifies in this essay the phenom enon of the double. A
doubling, dividing and interchanging of the self which serves as a constant
recurrence of the same thing. This "double" motif can occur through
reflections in mirrors, shadows, guardian spirits, belief in the soul and the
fear of death. The double denies the destruction of the ego and the power of
death. It is a construction designed to preserve the subject against extinction.
10
But, from this idea of "double" as preserver emanating from self-love and
narcissism, a reversion occurs signifying the double as a harbinger of death.
"But as infantile grandiosity yields to the all-too-obvious facts of helplessness,
the subject's own creation becomes a Frankenstein monster. So that the ideas
that 'have sprung from the soil of unbounded self-love, from the primary
narcissism which holds sway in the m ind of the child as in that of primitive
m an/ form the basis for a turn of events: 'w hen this stage has been left behind
the double takes of a different aspect. From having been an assurance of
immortality, he becomes the ghastly harbinger of death'. He becomes a ghost,
a ghoul, a spook." 6
I'm interested in the potential for metaphoric transform ation that this
doubling effect affords, it represents an underlying subtext, a possibility for
absence to become represented, as it disturbs the assumed stability of images,
offering a reading that favors ambiguity and mutability. In my own research
and work I'm particularly interested in the way in which the uncanny as a
stylistic form has been absorbed and presented through the genre of 20th
century horror and suspense film. This m edium has been especially adept at
creating an experience, the film and its viewing in the movie house, that
enables us to experience the uncanny from a safe distance, yet one that also
engulfs us in its narrative construct. From film classics such as
Frankenstein, Dracula, M, to more contemporary films such as The Birds,
Carrie, and Eraserhead, we are draw n to an experience that allows us to live
out our most repressed fears and anxieties.
11
The four photo based images I've used in for For Those Closer to the Source.
enamel paint silkscreened on brass plates, are all taken from various horror
and mystery films of the 50's and 60's, individual stills from The Birds,
Village of the Damned, Eyes W ithout a Face, and The Innocents. These are
mostly images of children either in a moment of terror, or longingly waiting
for something to happen. Even though the images are representations of
innocence, they also disrupt innocence, acting as the double, by their implied
sense of malignant terror just simmering under their glossy surfaces. In one
of them, a group shot of about ten children staring directly at the viewer, it's
possible to infer a reading of this image as representing the psychic and
ideological terrain of the dom inant narrative within our culture; as the
children are all white, Anglo Saxon, but it's also w hat's not in the image
which makes it resonate. For the absence of any marginality within this
tightly compressed textual centrality immediately begins to work as the
subtext of the image. It is this ineffable quality of the images, that m oved me
to include them along with the text and paintings. An ineffable sense, of
escape, rupture, release, and wonder. And although, these are loaded genre
images, fully contrived through their stylization as cliches, I still believe that
they carry a sense of resonance and transformation, as well as, enriching the
m etaphoric relationships between the elements of the installation. This
selection of images also reflects the way in which the uncanny has become a
constant presence in m odern culture, intensified by shifts in the form of
expression from the w ritten page to the cinematic screen.
12
But because of this popular usage of an uncanny vocabulary, the power of the
uncanny to serve as a catalyst of disruption has been dissipated and thus
absorbed into the popular verbiage of our m odem condition, becoming mired
as a stylized cliche designed only to illustrate horror instead of producing it.
I'm aware that this is the very problematic that occurs in the usage of these
loaded, cliched images within the context of the installation, but I also think,
that their function as a stylized, genre images, adds to their narrative, textual
function w ithin the installation.
This leads me to the paintings, the most overt and commanding element of
the installation. These paintings which are a continuation of my fascination
with surfaces over the last few years, are topographical terrains that conjure
associations with a social, physical, or cultural body. Through their eruptive,
oozing, mutative physical appearance, they suggest all kinds of metaphorical
perm utations from, biological/cellular structure, geological, corporeal, food
like, and psychedelic states. Topographical fragments playing upon our
familiar recognition of these surfaces, they vascilate between the visceral and
the beautiful, between the low and the exalted, between the macro and the
micro. It's this ambivalence that is essential to the work, one m oment
suggesting a decaying, rotting, entropic corpus, the other a beautiful
relationship of colors, textures, and surfaces.
As Lane Relyea writes describing Vija Celmins' work:
Celmins' rock-a-bye oceans and twinkle-twinkle starscapes vibrate
faintly with the echoes of high-seas adventure and daring space-
missions of risk and discovery. But mostly these calm waters and
13
clear skies evoke primal forms of escape and finality: they promise
reassurance, blanketing , submersion, as well as helplessness, abandonment,
loss— at once untold contentment and ultimate desolation. 8
Perhaps this description of Celmins' work is a fitting analogy to my own. Like
Celmins, I come from a psychologically and emotionally scarred background,
having had to adapt and lose myself to a new culture, I have had to shed
remnants of my former self which has m ade me to go through life with an
inherent sense of loss. Perhaps it is this loss that I'm constantly picking over,
trying to regain an idealized and whole past, always nostalgically longing for
fragments of it. Because I can not go back, I'm consumed with any entity that
will act as surrogate and allow me to fetishize it. Again Relyea on Celmins:
"Celmins' vision is spellbound, at once alert and paralyzed— she peers at
everyday reality through zombie eyes, her forms apprehended with shocking
attentiveness even though they seem trapped beneath a layer of dust" 9.
This weariness andpessimism, this sense of estrangement posits the work
within the allegorical impulse, trying to reconstruct an idyllic center out of
fragments of culture that might seem debased or inconsequential while
constantly acknowledging this loss. There is a layer of sadness, of
melancholic despair overriding the work, which might just be my realization
that ultimately I can not escape the symbolic order of language towards an
imaginary site outside of language, since true escape would be ultimately
have to be death.
NOTES
14
1. J.K. Huysmans, Against The Grain, pp. 151-152.
2. Craig Owens, "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory
of Postmodernism." October, pp. 67-86.
3. Sigmund Freud, "The Uncanny," in the Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, pg. 220.
4. Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the
M odern Unhomelv, pg. 3.
5. same as 3, pg. 226.
6. Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, pg. 177.
7. Lane Relyea, "Earth to Vija Celmins," A rtForum , Oct. 1993, pg. 56.
8. same as 7, pg. 56.
15
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny" (1919). In The Standard Edition
of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James
Strachey. The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1953-1973. Vol. XVII, pp. 219-253.
Huysmans, J.K. Against the Grain. Dover Publications, Inc., 1969.
Krauss, Rosalind. The Optical Unconscious. The MIT Press, 1992.
Owens, Craig. "The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of
Postmodernism." October. (Dec. 1980), pp. 67-86.
Relyea, Lane. "Earth to Vija Celmins." A rtForum , (Oct. 1993),
pp. 55-59.
Vidler, Anthony. The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the M odern
U nhom elv. The MIT Press, 1992.
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Asset Metadata
Creator
Bravo, Leonard
(author)
Core Title
A thesis
School
Graduate School
Degree
Master of Fine Arts
Degree Program
Fine Arts
Degree Conferral Date
1995-08
Publisher
University of Southern California
(original),
University of Southern California. Libraries
(digital)
Tag
fine arts,OAI-PMH Harvest
Language
English
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Digitized by ProQuest
(provenance)
Advisor
Weisberg, Ruth (
committee chair
), [Dudziak, Mary L.] (
committee member
), [illegible] (
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