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+ TEXT Nº. 1 — ARTIST STATEMENT

My projects are constructed around drawings. The drawings are the work, the R+D, and the methodological testing ground for a given project. I use drawing for its proximity to cognitive action, and because it privileges the gestures of writing.
In my drawings, the gesture of writing is exacerbated to the point of rendering any recognizable notation illegible.
This is done to the ends of emptying the content from the written language, but preserving the vehicle — now
isolated as a visual element.

The point of departure for my production is often found in the texts, etchings, paintings, or historical writings of others.
My sources are sources of labor, working models, thought structures. They are referenced as are footnotes, discretely promoting the intelligibility of extracted elements. The source content that served as the pretext for a drawing is lost during the
drawing’s creation. The spectator is forced to (re)create meaning in a way that corresponds with the value creation necessary to everyday life. I am interested in death as an absolute value. Everything one does in life is in the task of creating a positive value against the value of his/her imminent and absolute death. Drawing is my way of hewing away at Death’s monument.

Drawing leads to other media. I am interested in applying similar production models, (models developed, applied & modified in drawing) to different media (video, performance, text, photo, install, virtual etc.). Through repetition & variation, meaning undergoes abrasive cycles of creation & destruction. Meaning is like matter, and changes in its form create energy. The primary function of my not-drawings is to A] harness this energy, B] provide a window into the content base of the drawings.

Richard Höglund

+ TEXT Nº.2 — ÁFANGAR BY MARIE - AGNÈS CHARPIN

Afangar est une œuvre réalisée en 1990 par Richard Serra, un des sculpteurs américains contemporains les plus importants. Pour les 20 ans d’ Afangar, R. Höglund se rend sur les lieux pour réaliser des dessins, des photographies et des vidéos à partir de l’installation de R.Serra.
L’ œuvre porte le nom d’Afangar en hommage à un texte éponyme du poète Jon Helgason. Elle est composée de 9 paires de piliers en basalte, implantés à Vesturey, sur l’île de Viôey en Islande. Ces 9 paires de piliers de 3 à 4 mètres de haut dessinent une forme géométrique dont le périmètre occupe la moitié de l’île. Il faut environ deux heures de marche pour visiter cet ensemble. Créée dans une logique minimaliste, cette œuvre fonctionne comme une installation complète et autonome pour rivaliser avec l‘environnement naturel..

Les œuvres de R. Serra se situent entre la sculpture minimaliste, l’installation monumentale et l’architecture; il s’agit soit d’environnements sculpturaux dans lesquels les visiteurs peuvent déambuler, soit d’interventions quasi - architecturales et colossales menées dans des espaces donnés. R. Serra intervient principalement en plein air, dans des territoires urbains ou naturels. Les interventions in situ soulignent chez le sculpteur une dextérité et une capacité d’adaptation aux espaces investis. L’artiste conçoit ses pièces qu’après s’être rendu sur les lieux. Les œuvres réalisées dans la nature traduisent une ouverture sur l’espace environnant, elles permettent une redéfinition du site sous la forme d’un parcours qui devient le contenu de l’œuvre. Ainsi la mise en place des éléments sculpturaux dans un cadre naturel incite le spectateur à s’attacher à la topographie du lieu. Ce que ne peuvent prévaloir les oeuvres destinées à un contexte urbain dont l’attention est focalisée sur la sculpture elle - même.
Les sculptures de Serra sont constituées de formes géométriques élémentaires et conçues en métal ou plaques d’acier très lourdes. Leurs poids et leurs dimensions monumentales évoquent l’architecture. Serra conçoit la sculpture comme un dessin dans l‘espace. Le traitement du matériau synthétique ou naturel, sa transformation fait partie de l’acte de dessiner. «La création de la forme se trouve dans le dessin, à l’intérieur de la transformation physique du matériau, d’un état à un autre». De la matière au matériau, de la matérialité de l’espace à la nature de la sculpture, le travail de Serra est impressionnant de simplicité où l’espace semble linéaire et paradoxalement toujours en mouvement.

Fortement touché par la démarche de R. Serra, R. Höglund part sur les traces de l’artiste pour s’imprégner de son œuvre et du parcours sculptural à Reykjavik. C’est souvent à partir de découvertes telles que des textes ou des œuvres d’autres artistes que s’inspirent et débutent les projets de R.Höglund.
Lors de son séjour, il fait à son tour un relevé topographique pour réaliser par la suite des productions à partir du contenu et plus particulièrement de la situation géographique de l’installation ainsi que des données botaniques de l’île. Artiste protéiforme, R.Höglund a réalisé pour l’exposition à la Spirale deux séries de 9 dessins au crayon graphite et à l’encre, une série de 9 photographies, une installation et des images vidéo. Des œuvres qui relatent des expérimentations et des recherches d’une syntaxe personnelle à partir des 9 paires de piliers de Serra. Des œuvres qui proposent une réflexion sur la perception, l’espace et le mouvement. Elles conjuguent un travail sur la matière et le temps par l’emploi de la forme géométrique, de la ligne et une écriture scripturale. La ligne sert le récit, elle rend possible la composition, un parcours spatial et une hiérarchisation du dessin. R.Höglund explore la question du sens, de la confrontation entre l’œuvre et le site, les rapports entre le volume et le dessin. Images graphiques, photographiques et filmiques sont alors des espaces spontanés où figure une écriture chargée de symboles alliant différents territoires référentiels, formels et esthétiques en mémoire d’Afangar.

Marie - Agnès Charpin
Commissaire d’exposition - 2011

+ TEXT Nº 3 — LOOKING FOR THE PRESENCE OF OTHERNESS IN ART
(THE RELATION BETWEEN SCHIZE, SCHIZOÏDE, SCHIZOPHRÉNIE) BY DAPHNÉ LE SERGENT

Richard Höglund’s drawings follow a common theme. This theme is the line. If speech is regulated by breath, then Richard Höglund’s lines are regulated by a hand moving a graphite point across a sheet of paper. But it is not the action of generating a drawing. It’s not a loose movement, guided by an arm imitating curves, spirals and large arcs. It’s more like the movement of a hand that has freed itself from an immobile arm. The hand is like a nervous animal, at the end of a leash. The lines of Richard Höglund’s drawings are sinuous, precise and vivid. It’s as though the action of writing no longer says anything, no longer means anything, but maintains an almost oscillatory mechanical activity.
The action of drawing is separated from its function and gives itself over to frenetic movement with a joy that leads to the distortion of the line beyond all sense. The rush of the gesture is like the topic of a conversation, it’s organic. Variations in the line seem like jumps on an electrocardiogram that don’t reflect a heartbeat, but rather reflect the punctuations of a broken machine. That’s why Richard Höglund’s drawings look like graphs without any recognizable iconography. When a line is very dark, it indicates the high degree of pressure applied by the hand. Where one sees nervous peaks appearing suddenly in the middle of a line, it translates as an intensity in the hand’s activity, the line serves as the index of an interior rhythm that changes as feelings vary.
The lines of Höglund’s drawings reveal the same mechanism we talked about in language a moment ago. In this sense it represents a sort of pre-language, an enunciation of sounds prior to language, or the act of scribbling that is prior to writing. The pre-language issues from a meeting, a joyful meeting, between the throat and the word, between the moving hand and the sheet of paper. The poet Francis Ponge named this exultant coupling between the body and the structures of the world, objoie. The word is a French neologism and is the combination of two separate words, “objet”, which means “object” and “joie”, which means “joy.” Hence, objoie. For psychoanalyst Pierre Fedida, objoie brings to the fore the functioning of the fort-da, a concept formulated by Freud after the First World War. In the fort-da, the toy yoyo taken up by the child represents the mother figure. When the child lets go of the yoyo, the mother is represented as far away, when the child pulls the yoyo towards himself, the image of the mother approaches. When the yoyo comes back to him he exclaims “daaaaaa”, and it is this exultation, this joy, which resonates later in the creative process of objoie. Therefore in objoie we see the resurgence of an original bond taking place: the presence / absence of the mother-figure. That is to say, a sort of nascence of the sign.
Therefore for the poet or the artist the sign or the word is a store of resonance. The intensity of the objoie or the mark of the line of a drawing echoes a primordial feeling: that of an exclusive mother-child relationship. If this is the prerogative of the artist or the poet it is also the prerogative of the schizophrenic who treats words like things and who thinks that the word “cat” scratches and meows. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari write about schizophrenics. They recognize in the schizophrenic figure a fragmentation into what they call multiple desiring machines. Desiring machines are always connected, one to the other, like the mouth of a newborn baby to the mother’s breast. They guarantee continuous circulation of the flow of desire. This concept is derived from Melanie Klein’s concept of the part-object, which tries to explain the ambivalent relationship between the young child and the mother. But we’ll talk about that later.
In the work of Richard Höglund there is something which is beyond a pre-language and which prefigures the grammatical construction of language. I will call this “jargon”. In fact, there are many similarities between writing and drawing. Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky outline the correlations between lettered and pictorial signs, between a period and a point. “To write and to draw,” wrote Klee “are essentially identical.” The conceptual artist Douglas Huebler once remarked, “When I was still drawing, I used the smallest visual sign imaginable, that is to say, a point, and speculated about its double meaning in terms of language and the blank page.”
Next comes the line, which elongates the mark of the point, spreading it out across a length. The line welds together one point to another, one element to the next. In the debate between partisans of drawing and of color, in which the work of the painter Poussin is opposed to that of Rubens, the line is what allows the artwork to express its narrative. Regarding color, it only serves to reflect feeling and, from there, turn the painting from its calling to the Ut Pictura Poesis, poetry as painting. The line gives shape to a history and serves as a narrative. It permits the creation of a hierarchy, gives order to a composition; it’s oriented towards a reading which makes a spectator of it.

If you wish to continue to compare writing and drawing, the line evokes the syntactic axis. The syntactic axis produces a hierarchy of linguistic signs, a combination of words in the structure of a sentence. Compared to the syntactic axis, lines are drawn according to a perspective rush from a point of departure to the plane of the spectator. In their deployment they link elements to other elements; figures are positioned in a hierarchy from smallest to largest, from farthest to closest, from the least visible to the most apparent. Forms are ordered in terms of perspective, while words – subject, verb, object – are ordered by the rules of syntax.
For Roman Jakobson all linguistic signs imply modes of arrangement either according to syntax or semantics. Semantics organizes concepts according to associations of similarity, picking a sign form the same conceptual category and the permutation ensures the richness of the expression. The semantic functions are on the level of the metaphor and the paradigm. The metaphor, which creates a relation of similitude between two terms from the same category of words, is the preliminary act of creating a space. It induces a strict coexistence of these two terms. If the line of the syntactic axis produces a series and hierarchy of elements, the semantic axis opens up a space in which the elements exist simultaneously and thus constitute a frame that will define an expanse.
In Richard Höglund’s drawing CEM XXI, 2007 a few large strokes traverse the page accompanying the viewer on his trip around the work, bestowing it with a temporality which in turn lends a hierarchy to the composition. That could be or represent the syntactic axis. But in the center, very diluted ink discretely signals the presence of a grey square. In this square the play in symmetry between high and low, right and left, creates a spatial gate in which elements are subject to permutation by its geometric equality. That could be the semantic axis or space.
A moment ago I spoke about “jargon.” Jargon is held between the internal breath of expression and language’s intelligible structure. It is located between interior and exterior. For example, jargon is the poetry of Francois Dufrêne or the dada poems of Raoul Hausmann. Raoul Hausmann speaks of his poems as the “automobiles of the soul.” Jargon is constructed by a preconscious assimilation of language structures and of semantic and syntactic axes. Lacan reminds us that what the Subject misses is that this construction is always linked to his unconscious reserve. When the Subject tells a story he must adjust these linguistic structures according to his memory’s psychic core. Artists mislead and deform this language architecture in order to build individual structures whose walls enclose the Subject, tightly guarding its internal rhythm to the detriment of its external legibility.
Jargon is at the edge of a schize. The word schize comes from the Greek skhiezein, to split. It separates the interiority and the exteriority of the subject. The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu calls this the Moi-Peau. The word schizophrenic is derived from this term and was first coined by Eugen Bleuler in 1911. He used the word schize as the base and added phrên, which means thought or mind. Literally, the word schizophenic evokes the idea of a permanent crack in the self.
One of the things I try to show in my work, notably in a book entitled L’image-charnière ou le récit d’un regard, is how the placement of elements in a work of art maintains a balance on the edge of a schize, and how it originates from jargon. On the one hand, works are in play with the semantic and syntactic axes of language. They make the work into a spectator. On the other hand, they represent an interior feeling, an objoie.
At the level of artistic creation, the word schizophrenic is nothing, but an image. It’s like primitivism in art. Modern artists who were inspired by primitive art knew nothing about anthropology. They were just trying to produce new, strange and radical forms in their work. By evoking the image of the primitive other in the heart of their work they positioned themselves in opposition to the conservative, bourgeois values inherited from the previous century.
In the 50’s and 60’s the colonial world rebelled against their colonizers. From then on, colonized nations seemed to have been ravaged and devastated by Western exploitation. The only voyage possible at this point was a return towards the self. The schizophrenic figure became the new myth. R.D. Laing and the anti-psychiatry movement spoke about the disorder as though it was not innate, but rather a construction one was driven to by capitalism. Crazy became the new primitive. We no longer sought a fusion of man and nature, that primitive man, this was an idea inherited from the Enlightenment. What people were looking for was nature itself, the inexhaustible gush, the impulsive power, the desire. And the schizophrenic became the representative figure of this. A mythic figure forged by a desire to resist the capitalist system.
This is the context in which one must understand the schizophrenic of the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In this book, I position the work of art on the plane of the schizophrenic. The work is on the edge of a schize between a desirous, powerful, confused production and the structures of language. The work is a form of jargon, somewhere between interiority and exteriority. Because of this, works of art can no longer be considered in terms of medium. Francis Ponge’s poetry is evocative of the jargon in Richard Höglund’s drawings. These drawings are like modern devices/mechanisms.
You will no doubt want to know what kind of linguistic structures can be revealed in installations or in mechanisms. These structures are found at the very beginnings of the creative process from the moment when the creator decides that he or she wants the work to respond to a critical intention. The work must take into account the conditions of its economic, political, and social production. The work has to say something about the world; it must be positioned within art history on the contemporary art scene, which varies according to geopolitical realities.
For instance, in the 60’s and 70’s there was a whole series of works that contested the use of utilitarian objects which I will call “black boxes”. In Self-portrait as a fountain (1966), Bruce Nauman photographed himself issuing a thin stream of water from his mouth, making reference to Duchamp. During a break at a film festival, Valie Export covered her bare chest with a box and invited passers-by to come slide their hands under it. She was experimenting with her own form of cinema as a means of opposing the dominant existing image of the female sexual object on the big screen (Tapp und taskino, Touch cinema, 1964). Vito Acconci cast himself in his own films like Blindfolded catching, 1970, in which he tries to catch a ball blindfolded. In Singing sculpture (Underneath the arches), 1971 Gilbert & George situate themselves in a public space and maintain a statue-like stillness. They are dressed in typical London chic style and make jerky movements like robots. Chris Burden remains lying down for twenty two days in a bed located in a gallery in Bed Piece (le lit) in 1972. Bill Viola films himself licking a window (In Version, 1973), and even screaming (Tape I, 1972). As for Maria Abromovic, in a 1975 performance she danced on African drums with her head covered with a bag which blocked her vision of her surroundings. The performance lasted eight hours, until she collapsed.
The action is isolated and repeated as though it has no end. On the whole, the work maintains the artist’s action in a fixed space, which is almost sculptural. In fact, the work expresses through this tension, through this exhaustion. The artist inscribes his body in the social, political and economic environment. The artist’s body is reified, impersonal, lived by all. Here we see a critical intention at metaphor, which powerfully draws on the semantic axis. The metaphor is manifest in the body that becomes a tool, the man who coughs, the man who bleeds, the woman who dances in order to exhaust herself, and against utilitarianism. The artist asserts a critical intention regarding society. The work of art becomes the vector of a societal critique, of a sort of language.
On the other hand there are also works which seem to be void of intentionality. Although it may be beyond the artist’s critical consciousness, there is something that becomes manifest over the course of the act of creation. In some ways it is like a feeling, born of a body engaged in the activity of making art, it is objoie. The fact that the work focuses on a single action, a sole gesture, emphasizes the relationship between subject and object, between the body and the structures of the world. However this meeting is void of the jubilation that usually characterizes objoie, in it’s place there is a sort of tension. Bruce Nauman explains how this tension comes about during the performances he practices in his studio. For example, he walks slowly or plays the violin.
“In one of these early films I played the violin as long as I could. Since I didn’t know how to play this instrument it was pretty difficult to play the four strings as fast as possible for as long as possible. I had ten minutes of film. I played for seven minutes, then I started to get tired. I had to stop to take a break and then finish. […] My fingers couldn’t handle it anymore and I couldn’t hold on to the violin anymore. I wanted to address a problem for which it didn’t matter whether or not I knew how to play the violin. So I’d played the cords ré, mi, la, ré using the four strings of the violin. I thought that it would just make noise, but in fact, the piece proved itself very musically interesting. It’s a piece full of tension. […] If you really begin to be tired or you really try to stay balanced on one foot for a long time you end up inspiring sympathy with the viewer. In a way, it’s a bodily reaction. The spectator feels the leg and the tension.”
On the one hand, Bruce Nauman shows this tension, this intensity of bodily action, on the other hand, his work draws on a type of language. He is creating a metaphor. The body is likened to a sort of machine, a violin-playing machine. The body is reified and produces a distorted reflection and a critique of our tools. In the piece by Bruce Nauman in which he plays the violin quickly without stopping, there is a non-intention too that is like a jargon. One oscillates between the intense activity of the artist’s body, an interiority, and a sort of language.
Even when the work does not explicitly show the intense activity of the body, it seems to recognize it in an indirect way. For example, Robert Morris’ famous Column (1961) foreshadowed the imprint of the body in his future work on standardized, geometric shapes. The same year, influenced by dada-isme and by Marcel Duchamp’s boîte verte, Robert Morris made many cubes whose measurements were all referenced to the artist’s body (pine portal, portal, box for standing). What this emphasizes, other than their anthropomorphism, is the influence of the process of fabrication on them. The body left its mark in spite of the cold and impersonal appearance of the objects. Other boxes, also from 1961, play recordings of the sound of their construction (box with the sound of its own making), or even the heartbeat of the artist (heartbeat). In 1964, Robert Morris had a show at the Green Gallery in New York. The show consisted of geometric shapes plated in grey (untitled (corner beam), untitled (corner piece), untitled (table),… etc.). These individual forms, whose dimensions were no longer drawn from the artist’s body, but from standard measurements, must be specially constructed for each exposition and then subsequently destroyed. Their ephemeral character seems to assume their former anthropomorphic dimension. In Robert Morris’ work you have, on one hand, a critical intention of minimalist artist to make the spectator aware of the physicality of the space. On the other hand, you have a non-intention; something gives rise to a bodily, corporeal tension. It’s the ephemeral nature of his work that is similar to the living, perishable character of the body.
Later on, Robert Morris’ series In the realm of the carceral would make geometric forms out of architectural cells that constrain and mistreat the body. Peter Halley worked in this genre. These days, there are many works of contemporary art that try to represent bodily sensations: the objects of Mona Hatoum, Rober Gober, Absalon, Javier Perez, Jana Sterbak, Douglas Gordon… all make pieces that reinstate memories of the body and of perception. These are objects that testify to the acuteness of something lived, either of an experience, a situation, or something imagined. They create a mental space through the medium, a place where relations with the world are incarnated. These images are Bildung. This is a German term which, in addition to denoting the representation of things, also denotes this form’s capacity to receive perception.
These works also bring about a non-intention, something which is beyond discourse and which arises from feeling. Non-intention is what renders art objects more alive and real than everyday objects. The non-intention is the movement of life in art. We all know how important this slogan about the relationship between art and life was for art throughout the 60’s and how it subsequently became one of the precursors to contemporary art. Artworks, therefore, encompass the non-intention, however oftentimes they also encompass a critical intention geared toward the world. Absalon investigates the human condition. Jana Sterbak addresses the timelessness of mythology. Douglas Gordon questions the society of spectacle. Many articles and art catalogues testify to this critical intention.

For a final time I will try to show how this interplay between intention and non-intention is played out at the very beginning of the creative act. The artist and the submissive have two different and opposing orders: on the one hand, there is feeling and on the other there is language. The gap between the two characterizes what I call the schizophrenia of creation.
According to Didier Anzieu, the creative process follows five stages. “1/ to feel gripped by something; 2/ become aware of an unconscious psychic representation ; 3/ set up the work’s organizing framework and select a apt medium to give form to this framework ; 4/ imagine the detailed work ; 5/ produce the work.”. During the first stage the artist is in a regressive and dissociative state. This first stage consists of a sort of « regression » into primary processes; this causes the id to emerge. Rationality is abandoned in favor of images and feelings. This stage is very intense. This intensity is caused by the return of impulsive desires, a resurgence of the intensity of the relationship with the mother figure in early childhood. The narcisstic identification is activated to the benefit of an all-powerful medley of maternal images created on the edge of the self and non-self. The creator has to face a feeling of emptiness and confront the anguish of having the limits of his self threatened. In this sense, artists like Richard Höglund and Bruce Nauman use the intense activity of the work they undertake to reveal this stage of creation in their pieces.
Similarly, in this regressive phase, there is a provisionary dissociation of the psyche. Over the term dissociation, Anzieu prefers the term “taking hold” of the creator through a “feeling-image-affect” and “release” to denote normal control of the self. “[…] to seize, and better still, to seize hold of something, is to place the hand with determination, with quick power, it’s to take decisively, to grasp, to master, then applying this term to the mental plane, to seize is concerned with the consciousness that embraces, that apprehends an object by perception or reasoning. Such is the paradox of the creator’s taking hold, the coexistence of extreme activity on the part of the conscience and extreme inactivity on the part of the remainder of the Ego.”
Regarding the artists of the 60’s, if they created an outpouring of intense activity from the first stage of creation, they nevertheless submitted to the demand for a critical intention. The “conceptual” approach of the artist is chosen beforehand and determines the frame in which she will work. One is right to think intention and non-intention take place simultaneously in the first stage of creation.
The primary process of creation marks the return of the id. However, for Freud the power of the id had two components. The first is Eros which seeks to maintain the unity of the person. Eros is the source of all relationships, on the one hand with the mother, but also with all the other objects and beings in the infant’s environment who participate in the construction of the id. However, this impulse never functions alone; it is accompanied by a destructive force, Thanatos. “One must suppose,” wrote Freud, “that the final goal of the destructive force is to bring the living back to an inorganic state and this is why we also call it the death impulse”.
Why isn’t the return of the id in the creative act twofold, Eros and Thanatos together? The force of Eros is evocative of objoie, of the living remnants of a feeling, of the power of non-intention, the inclusion of the life in art. Thanatos, for its part, calls to mind a disintegration of the lifeless, perhaps the part of the work which is reified in order to become linguistic and to be readable by the spectator, which responds to a critical intention of the work.
There would be more than « seizure/release », were it not for the pull between two opposing impulses: on the one hand, Eros which is unleashed in the face of a threatened loss of the limits of the self when confronted with the newly activated transitional space shared with the mother figure; on the other hand, there is Thanatos which modulates this amplitude so that its coincides with the conventions of museums, society and the economy.
According to this perspective, creation is not solely visible in the idea of the maturation or refinement of a primary process. It submits to the artist and from the onset this has a dual relationship, highlighted by Adorno. The artist of the 60’s had to make life manifest in art, which he achieved through the installations and environments. The objects seemed to have been taken from real life without the artist’s intervention. They were reminiscent of the world from which they had come. However, since we saw life in them, it seemed that the artist had done something to mediate our relationship with these everyday objects, that he hadn’t simply taken them and put them in a museum. Somehow he had excited all of their real substance. And he did this by means of an appropriation. For example, the work of Bruce Nauman recognizes a society in which objects reign. But he does more than just display these objects; he exalts the relationships that we have with these objects. He imbues his work with tension. The thing is lived from the inside, it takes hold of the real through a feeling, but Nauman knows that the objective of the work is not the expression of the subjective. The artists of the 60’s tried to use installations to get their art to objectively recognize the world. Subjectivity had to be invisible, dead, denied. Adorno raises this issue when he asserts that the artist must be a stranger to the forms he displays, that he must show them completely objectively. But he must also be the mediator of this objectivity and use of expression. However, this is not “expression” as we normally use the word, it’s not the expression of a feeling, or an idea, or a word, but rather, it is the most basic form of expression, that is to say, objoie. One takes away nothing from the work so much as a reinforcement of a connection, the subject-object relationship.
As an artist isn’t one always confronted with what Gregory Bateson calls the double constraint? Double constraint indicates a paradox in the relationships lived by the schizophrenic. He must respond positively to the love simulated by the mother, but at the same time he is punished by her for this outpouring.
Couldn’t this double constraint be understood as the dual demand that artists feel toward their work: on the one hand, the obligation to hide themselves behind the world of objects and to let this apparent objectivity appear as the only critical imperative of the work; and on the other hand, the desire to maintain the efficiency of their execution of the work, often produced by a lived experience, a “projection” of the subject onto the object.
In this sense, one could speak about a schizophrenic creative figure existing in the gap created between intention and non-intention. It’s the artist’s schize, his jargon that is present in an artwork. The schizophrenia of creation is a sort of summit of modernity and the avant-garde. On the one hand, modern artists broke with traditional representation in favor of showing the process of production. On the other hand, they were trying to represent life and the world. These two demands are present, in condensed forms, during the initial phase of the creative process, allowing for what I have been calling a schizophrenia of creation.
What remains interesting to consider, in the final place, is how prefacing creative work with a schize echoes our relationship with the world. In this conception, the subject enacting this creation is not a traditional Cartesian subject, it is not the subject of cogito ergo sum. The subject that emerges in this process is one constantly conscribed by his limits, a subject in defined by an ever-changing a schize. This perspective on a type of schizophrenia in creation allows us to understand how we experience and live our own bodies. This body is always maintained in interfaces with mechanisms, in subject-object relations that fracture the identity of the self. For instance, the devices employed by blockbuster films, that is to say, sensational films, remove all distance between spectator and image. The philosopher Marie-José Mondzain wrote: “The proper place or distance of the spectator is a political question. Violence resides in the systematic violation of distance. This violation gives rise to spectacular devices that, voluntarily or involuntarily, interfere with the boundaries between spaces and bodies to produce a confused continuum where all possibility of differentiation is lost.”
Didier Anzieu, Le corps de l’œuvre, essais psychanalytiques sur le travail créateur, Paris, NRF, Gallimard, 1981, p. 93.
Didier Anzieu, Le corps de l’œuvre, essais psychanalytiques sur le travail créateur, p. 103.
Sigmund Freud, Abrégé de psychanalyse, Paris, PUF, Bibliothèque de psychanalyse, 1949, p. 8.
Marie-José Mondzain, L’image peut-elle tuer ? Paris, Bayard Presse, 2004, p. 78.

Daphné Le Sergent