Oil, Vinegar and Lacan: On the Validity of Rupture

The rupture is arguably one of the key concepts in contemporary art. It could be said without much controversy that it descends from modernism’s imperative to shock, revolutionize and disturb. And it could be argued, without much more contradiction, that modernism did not explore these notions in full by continuing to keep art on the pedestal of the avant-garde - although the change was nonetheless revolutionary when compared with the stale academicism of the 19th century. And today, even as the expression is being pronounced passé by some (or rather has been since at least 2013), the very concept of rupture is evident in the practice of many contemporaries.

The question is thus as follows – how valid does rupture continue to be?

The concept of rupture is concentrated in the idea of art as in some way revelatory, as something bringing forth an earlier unknown or unacknowledged aspect of reality, usually accompanied by a violent disruption of the comforts of previous unawareness. Adam Chodzko’s concept of puncture (which, if not completely synonymous with rupture, does certainly rhyme with it) is a “flaw or glitch in public space”, something which “should not be there”, a kind of manufactured flaw, a rupture in the established order.

But where is the puncture? What fabric does it rip through and what does it reveal?

The Invisible Hand of social critique

One interpretation is that of social critique, or even the explicitly political kind. It would seem that it would simply be enough to produce any contradiction against the fabric of established order. It is, however, becoming increasingly evident that this does not work.

Literal, surface level critique fails to produce a rupture because it still uses the terms of the system it critiques and usually functions through replication of already established artworks, whose revolutionary character is long gone. Instead of a rupture, they produce in the viewer a sense of fatigue and desensitization.

The problem could be more widely defined as a kind of claustrophobic system, in which all diversion is instantly reincorporated as part of the order it contradicts, or is a result of that order. Some critiques are simply not engaging enough, and instead of contesting the status quo they perpetuate it. This has been pointed out in multiple critiques of popular culture but arguably can be also attributed to “revolutionary” art (the bad kind), one of the most infamous examples of this being Banksy. But the issue is much wider than simply another “diversion against the system” sold for a million pounds at Sotheby’s, although such incidents are precisely symptomatic of the current predicament. The key issues here are commodification, institutionalization, and interpassivity. As Žižek points out, “anti-capitalism is widely disseminated in capitalism”. Not only is critique of the status quo an essential part of it, it is necessary to maintain it.

First of all, there is the paradox of financial value of artworks. Many ‘social critiques’ become the proverbial t-shirt with Che Guevara. Critique of capitalism is a commodity in capitalism, and, if one looks at the exorbitant prices of some works it seems that it is even quite a desirable one. This is connected to interpassivity, defined by Robert Pfaller as the situation where the cultural artefact (which can be easily expanded to include most of contemporary art) performs the critique for the viewers, permitting them to carry on without consequence or further reflection. These issues are facilitated by institutionalization – the display of artworks in a hermetic, exclusive and expensive space of the gallery. Not only does it prohibit full engagement with the work of art through presenting it as a luxury good, it also instantly implies a context of intellectual snobbery. What good is the rupture if we assume it as something beyond comprehension and thus end up with an extremely reserved point of view, where nothing can stir us anymore?

So, first of all, some ruptures are completely banal, and fail to affect the viewer, and thus fail to fulfill their purpose. Secondly, ruptures fail through institutionalization because they are perceived with too much disinterested uncertainty. This produces a cross-fire of de-sensitization, which aligns itself perfectly with the late capitalist mentality of cynicism and disavowal.

Oil, vinegar and Lacanian rupture

How can this de-sensitization be addressed? Maybe the tissue the puncture is piercing through should be not of an explicitly political kind, maybe it should not be aimed at any established social order but at its very foundation.

One example of such an approach could be Adrian Piper’s Catalysis series, a series of performances including the artist getting on the NY subway in clothes that had been soaked in a mixture of vinegar, cod liver oil, milk and eggs for a week, riding taxis with a towel stuffed in her mouth, playing recorded belches from a tape recorder concealed under her clothing at a library, or going shopping for some gloves while covered in a thick layer of wet paint and a sign saying “WET PAINT” attached to her. They are unannounced, unexpected, and displaced as far as possible from the context of the institution, their aim is to catalyse a reaction in the viewer.

Adrian Piper 'Catalysis IV'

The key here seems not to pronounce critique but to unsettle complacency, social comfort, to attack norms not face up but from the inside, to subvert reality and not criticize it.

Surface-level critique will not suffice. For a rupture to work it must lie beyond description, it must be senseless and, in its senselessness, must contest the way we make sense of things.

In political terms (but, importantly, not by any means limited to them) that would amount to contesting of capitalist realism (as defined by Mark Fisher) through production of abnormalities, aberrations, fractures, distortions, ripples on the surface of “normality” and “reality”.

What is this reality? What is the safe terrain shaken by ruptures? A surprisingly fitting answer is provided by Lacanian psychoanalytic theory.

According to Lacan, what is commonly referred to as reality is composed of the registers of Imaginary and Symbolic. In a simplification, the Imaginary corresponds to our self-awareness, and (restricted) consciousness, while the Symbolic is constituted by social context, in particular the realm of language. There is also the third register – the Real. The Real is that “which resists symbolization absolutely”. It is “both a transcendence troubling and thwarting Imaginary-Symbolic reality and its language from without as well as an immanence perturbing and subverting reality/language from within”. The Real is that which is missing from our reality, that which we cannot situate or even perceive. This is because the access to the Real is almost instantly lost through the entry into the Imaginary and Symbolic, which subject it to an irreversible fragmentation. Thus, it can only be perceived as sudden irruptions.

And as Mark Fisher points out: “For Lacan, the Real is what any ‘reality’ must suppress; indeed, reality constitutes itself through just this repression. The Real is an unrepresentable X, a traumatic void that can only be glimpsed in the fractures and inconsistencies in the field of apparent reality. So one strategy against capitalist realism could involve invoking the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us.”

One important thing to note about the Lacanian idea of reality is that it functions as a kind of coping strategy. The traumatic Real is suppressed to maintain functioning, and it is so traumatic precisely because it eludes our sense-making abilities. It must be, however, made clear that the Real that is being talked about here is not any transcendental or strictly noumenal realm, but it can be defined (externally) as the limit of the symbolic and the imaginary, set out by their very natures. In this sense the Real is that which cannot be accounted for on the terms of our reality.

This Lacanian scaffold of the relationship between the Real and reality in the human psyche is applied by Fisher to our political condition. The reality of capitalist realism is precisely that sustaining function of the system, functioning as a kind of all-permeating atmosphere. It’s founded on capitalism presenting itself as the only possible, or rather realistic system, thus, in a process not unlike the Barthesian ideological naturalization, transmuting itself, along with its values, into a fact.

Thus, the only way to jeopardize it is to demonstrate it being somehow inconsistent.

If there is any place where art might attempt to pierce reality (the realms of the Symbolic and Imaginary) and enter the Real, it would be in the cases where it denies all representation or interpretation, when it simply is, as an absurd blotch in the middle of our vision, an inscrutable presence, simply there. Isn’t this precisely the premise on which Adrian Piper Catalysis series functions? The absurdity, the inability to comply with our understanding, to be fitted into our reality is precisely what is the essence of the rupture. Piper, when talking about her work, relates to it as an exploration of “the real thing strange” a phrase taken from William Empson’s poetry. Through investigation of anomaly and Kant’s idea of non-conceptual content she is trying to reveal the real thing strange rather than to pin it down.

Similarly, in the case of Gregor Schneider’s Cube (also as a reference to Malevich’s non-objective world) – it does not perform any function known to us, does not serve any purpose, it simply is and thus is in contradiction to its surroundings. It is not a representation but a kind of surreal presence, an inscrutable unity. It could also be interpreted as a kind of absence filled with an intrusion – a chunk of our reality is missing and is instead replaced with this pitch black Thing.

Gregor Schneider 'Cube Hamburg'

In this way, artists manage to demonstrate the limits of known reality, and even if they do not have direct access to the Lacanian Real, their work might point us towards it, which may serve as one of the most successful strategies of rupture.

Institutionalization 2: The Reckoning

Such a solution is of course, not devoid of flaws itself. Perhaps precisely because such actions are beyond the normality of everyday reality, they are so easily dismissed by the popular criticism, which lies somewhere along the lines of saying that one has to be in some way mentally disturbed or perhaps lazy to do such things and call them art.

However, one should stop and consider these statements and the question that arises from them: does such art manage to create a rupture? One criticism could be that as soon as such action is encountered as art, it loses, as it were, all its revolutionary potential. And this is an attitude found not only among people unfamiliar with art – even in “artistic circles” one very frequently comments anything with the snarky, ironic remark of “oh, is it a performance?” and then moves on without much reflection. Even though the institutionalized, prepared approach of an announced performance or happening is exactly what Piper is aiming to escape through inserting her actions into “raw reality”, it still could be said that with the profound cynicism of the current era that itself is not enough. This is of course a rather pessimistic view, albeit a plausible one.

And then of course there is the issue of institutional taxidermy – the works are documented, taken out of their context and put back exactly in the place they were trying to escape – in the white space of the gallery. As Daniel Buren points out, to act as if one can escape the limits of the gallery is to “reinforce the prevailing ideology which expects diversion from the artist.”

And could it be fully denied that the artist is a revolutionary precisely because that is what is expected of them in the society? And what about the freedom of the artists’ subversive stance? Is there not any truth in what Fisher proposes is the precorporation of subversion by capitalist culture? One could even go to the extreme and agree with Buren that art, instead of a prophecy of a free society is in fact the luxury of a repressive society, and that an artist is, in fact, incapable of free expression.

Death of the Artist

The way out of this uncomfortable situation might be to do away with the glorified, messianistic position of the artist, not only as someone who provides the one and only true meaning of their text, but as someone who will provide successful revolutionary and subversive content. Instead, perhaps, a Barthesian death of the author should be proclaimed. It should be accepted that the rupture cannot provide solutions or straightforward answers but instead, as Adam Chodzko proposes, has to “provide an aperture for looking”.

Adam Chodzko 'The God Look-Alike Contest'

This is also reflected in Chodzko’s work, most prominently perhaps in Runners, an ongoing project in which the artist uses free advertising newspapers as a public space into which he inserts flaws – descriptions of absurd, non-existent objects, odd requests (God Look-Alike Contest), or advertisements for businesses located a continent away (We love you here even when you are there). They function as small manufactured glitches, odd signals in public space and, through that, in the way we live our lives, distorting and thus questioning the functioning of reality. These insertions, fractures, inconsistencies, just as Pipers or Schneider’s are absurd, they don’t make sense, they don’t fit into reality and thus expand it. In this interpretation the surreal (above reality) is the Real (beyond reality). These distortions are, however, only successful when confronted by the viewer, who attempts to understand them and subsequently recognizes them as something beyond normality. The rupture is thus not a self-sufficient entity, it needs the viewer, it has to be activated.

Adam Chodzko 'We love you here even when you are there'

Perhaps Barthes’s claim that “The true place of the writing is reading” can be translated into the context of contemporary art, in denying the unity and absolutism of rupture, and shifting weight in the direction of the receiving end. Piper, when talking about her Catalysis series remarks that the significance and experience of her works is defined completely by the viewer’s reaction and interpretation. She highlights that the work has no meaning outside of its function as a medium of change, and that it only exists between the artist and the viewer. Thus, it could perhaps be proposed that the rupture happens, as it were, in the middle, at the joints. As Merleau-Ponty remarks: “it is neither above nor beneath the appearances, but at their joints; it is the tie that secretly connects an experience to its variants”.

The question of whether rupture is still valid, does not, of course, have a simple answer, let alone a final resolution to be arrived at within this essay. Hopefully, however, it succeeded in demonstrating that it is in fact a complex issue. And that it is important, especially in the face of at least seemingly unresolvable issues of institutionalization and the functioning art market, for the rupture to be defined in a more open way. Rupture should thus be understood a tool for undermining reality, for questioning it and striving for alternative understandings, rather than a straightforward critique, which is likely to be ill-fated from the start. Most importantly, it also as to be understood that it is not only performed by the artist, but also by the viewer.

In more political terms, if “it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, and if art wants to be revolutionary in this respect, it would perhaps do better by equipping people with tools to imagine alternatives, to develop agency and the ability to question their realities, rather than by mechanically reproducing the formalistic expressions of “revolution” contained within the status quo. And this is maybe the primary function of the rupture - in generating suspicion and increasing sensitivity, gnawing at the edges of reality and familiarity, it could possibly form a positive feedback loop, making people more reflective and less likely to accept reality at face-value.

---

Sources used in this post:

Barthes, R. and Heath, S. (2007). Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang, pp.142-148.

Buren, D. (1973). Critical Limits. In: C. Doherty, ed., Situation. Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press.

Chodzko, A. (2009). Out of Place. In: C. Doherty, ed., Situation. Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press.

Fisher, M. (2010). Capitalist Realism. Winchester, UK: Zero Books, pp.7-9, 12-20.

Foregroundprojects.org.uk. (n.d.). Foreground - We love you here even when you are there. [online] Available at: http://foregroundprojects.org.uk/artists/adam-chodkzo/we-love-you-here-even-when-you-are-there/.

Johnston, A. (2018). Jacques Lacan (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). [online] Plato.stanford.edu. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/lacan/.

Lacan, J. (1991). Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I: Freud's Papers on Technique 1953-1954. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, p.66.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1968). The Visible and the Invisible. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, pp.105-129.

O’Doherty, B. (1976). Inside the White Cube. In: C. Doherty, ed., Situation. Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press.

Piper, A. (1971). Collection - Generali Foundation. [online] Foundation.generali.at. Available at: http://foundation.generali.at/en/collection/artist/piper-adrian/artwork/catalysis-iv.html?nomobile=1#.XJ5AsZj7SUk.

Piper, A. (1971). Concretized Ideas I’ve Been Working Around. In: C. Doherty, ed., Situation. Whitechapel Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery, The MIT Press.

Piper, A. (2018). Adrian Piper: Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016. New York: Museum of Modern Art, pp.74-75.

Storey, J. (2018). Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction. 8th ed. New York: Routledge.

Wilson-Goldie, K. (2013). On Rupture. [online] Frieze.com. Available at: https://frieze.com/article/rupture.