Here's Looking at You: Visual Art and Recent Psychoanalytical Theories

Reviews the book, Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives, edited by Griselda Pollock (see record 2006-09313-000). Readers looking for classical Freudian interpretations of works of art in terms of the biographies of their makers (as in Freud, 1910, or Adams, 1993) will likely be disappointed by this anthology edited by Griselda Pollock for New Interventions in Art History, a series of "textbook mini-companions" (p. ii) from Blackwell Publishing. Instead of using Freudian concepts to reveal latent content about artists, this anthology offers postmodernist psychoanalyses that almost ignore the artists in favor of the interpreters and, ostensibly, their readers. The common thread linking the essays in this volume is that the desires, expectations, and neuroses of interpreters so thoroughly color the artworks during close readings that one is not able to draw objective conclusions about the original artists without creating "a chain of projections that produces fictions" (p. 46). Instead, readers are asked to acknowledge from the outset that any close engagement with a work of art is performative--that is, an interpretive act that produces rather than recovers meaning. Consequently, subsequent readings of the interpretations necessarily involve an almost infinite regress so dense that one can only work through it with psychoanalysis. This psychoanalysis, however, is heavily influenced by Jacques Lacan; to some extent by Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Laura Mulvey, and others; and most directly by contributor Bracha Ettinger--all of whom replace the traditional emphasis on artists' intentions with an interrogated intersubjectivity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)