The Map Is Not the Territory: Viewing Julie Linowes’ Stain by Emma Ladd
"[It] isn't a world of things, it isn't a world of being, it's a world of desire."
- Jacques Lacan
In her new exhibition, Stain, Julie Linowes draws the viewer into the uncertain terrain between conscious and unconscious states, into a dreamscape where beautiful, translucent images are layered disturbingly against spreading, seeping lacunae. Using surreal imagery and startling juxtaposition—frothy wedding dresses and gleaming meathooks, ethereal figures and decaying carcasses—Linowes creates a world where the spectator is alternately enveloped in sensation and left reeling in shock; a world situated "on borderlines and thresholds: between sleeping and waking; inner and outer; visual and verbal; stasis and motion; reality and simulacra" (Marcus, 2001, p.52). Entering into this no-man's-land between the ideological trenches of conscious and unconscious experience, the spectator becomes likewise caught between the urge to explore and the need to explain: in other words, between the question of desire and the answer of fantasy.
The images in Stain might be viewed as a sequential and a circling narrative, a journey that loops queasily in and out of the fantastical and fundamentally unstable territory of the unconscious mind. Looking at Linowes’ work, the viewer drifts into something like a waking dream: light and shadow slide hypnotically over the screen, eliciting a vertiginous unease, while her obscured objects—prayer shawl, jewelry box, pig carcass—provoke unsettling responses. Like Bluebeard's dangerously curious wife, the viewer is drawn into each image—up a staircase lined with women, faces turned aside, legs swung open in indecent invitation. Lit from behind, the images seem to move, pulsating, breathing: building the viewer's sense of apprehension until it threatens to disrupt the order of perception, emotion, and self. It is easy to see why Linowes’ work has been compared with David Lynch's films, whose "dreaming visions are enticing invitations to explore experiential realms beyond the boundaries of ordinary rational consciousness and personal identity" (Bulkeley, 2003, p.4). However, the desire to explore new territory here is also accompanied by a sense of fear and potential danger: a naked child stares directly at the viewer from her pillow of dead meat, warning of the chamber of horrors within.
Offering a model of subjectivity grounded in lack rather than wholeness, Lacanian theory lends itself well to the consideration of Linowes’ unstable landscapes and their disturbing effect on the viewer. According to Lacan, our experience of the world and of ourselves represents a pressured and constantly shifting interplay between three perceptual registers: the symbolic, the imaginary, and the real. While the imaginary works to maintain a comforting sense of wholeness that we experience as reality, and the symbolic represents the attempt to maintain the accepted social order, the real is associated with that deeper reality which eludes representation. Linowes deliberately employs extremes of beauty and horror in her work, creating an intolerable tension both within the images and in the spectator. Looking, caught by the foully beautiful image of a woman's torso overlaid with a bleeding, glistening, rotting carcass, a visceral response arises—the heartbeat quickening as agitation stirs the flesh. Simultaneously, a more cerebral response occurs as associations and interpretations crowd into the spectator's awareness: this might be a bloody orchid or sexual organs: a deathly hole, oozing viscously. The spectator, much like a detective at a crime scene, wants to fill in the gaps, to literally make something out of nothing. But, while Linowes’ images may be dreamlike, the decoding map of dream interpretation is of no use in this in-between territory. The spectator, buffeted between pleasure and disgust, loses her bearings amongst the bewildering assemblage of signs and objects: figures and icons that are repeatedly overlaid in a kind of surplus of images, apparent landmarks that, in their excess, only increase our sense of uncertainty.
The surface of Linowes’ landscape is marked by patches of spreading stain that the spectator both recoils from and plunges into: quicksand underfoot. Here, as in the surplus of images, is the Lacanian real: desert spaces in which we can become lost. These gaps elicit a terrifying sense of emptiness and endlessness, what Michel Chion (1995) describes as "the space of a perpetual fall," which reveals the territory of the unconscious as "a few human encampments, pitched rather too recently, scattered in the horror of the desert" (p. 197). The areas of stain in Linowes’ work mark the void beneath the surface: as the spectator looks into this void, the movement of desire becomes visible.
Desire is an arrow that never reaches its target—the movement towards an object that must always elude our grasp (Zizek, 1991). This eternal pursuit, without hope of satisfaction, creates an unbearable sense of uncertainty in relation to the Other. Fantasy functions to counter this doubt with a sense of certainty. The images in Stain are doubly enigmatic, provoking the simultaneous desire to question and the construction of an imaginary answer through the interpretation of the spectator. This demand for unity recalls Lacan's suture: “a stitching together of the representational registers by means of delusion and fantasy, closing off the real from reality, closing off the unconscious from consciousness and preventing the subject from filling out the black hole of the real" (Zizek, 1991, p.viii). The areas of stain which permeate Linowes’ landscapes effectively create a space where suture is withheld, leaving the desiring spectator to fill in the gaps with interpretation.
The final image in Linowes work is one of apparent reconciliation: the layers and fragments have settled together at last, forming a whole: one woman sits on a beach gently cradling the pig carcass, the prayer shawl and jewellery box that loomed so large earlier now resting at her side. Yet this image of longed-for unity remains surrounded by a swirling, seeping vortex, suggesting that what is held here cannot remain, a reminder that desire is constantly circling, retracing the same path over and over. Linowes does not offer the relief of the fantasy of integration or of waking up and saying, "It was just a dream!" Rather, this image works both to fill a gap, and to leave one, in order that desire may survive in the form of possibility: the eternal pursuit of the lost object, freed from the fantasy of resolution. Through holding off suture, Julie Linowes leaves room for something else, drawing attention to the illusory nature of wholeness in both the images and the self, while urging the spectator to negotiate between the desiring question and the fantastic answer. If we are able to bear our unbearable desire for a little longer, and withstand the lure of fantasy, we may take pleasure in the fleeting moment of reconciliation.
References
Bulkeley, K. (2003). Dreaming and the Cinema of David Lynch. Dreaming: The Journal for the Association for the Study of Dreams, 13(1), 49-60.
Chion, M. (1995). David Lynch (R. Julian, Trans.). London: British Film Institute.
Lacan, J. (1988). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-55. Trans. S. Thomaselli. Cambridge.
Marcus, L. (2001). Dreaming and Cinematographic Consciousness. Psychoanalysis and History, 3 (1), 51-68.
Ogden, T. H. (2003). On Not Being Able to Dream. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 84, 17-30.
Zizek, S. (1991). Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. An OCTOBER Book, MIT Press.