Out of Sight, out of Body: the Sugimoto/ Demand Effect

Thomas Demand. Modell, 2000. 1 C-Print/Diasec, 164 ⁄2 x 210 cm. © Thomas Demand, VG Bild Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 Out of Sight, Out of Body: The Sugimoto/ Demand Effect

PARVEEN ADAMS

What is it to imagine that the art object will be able to effect a change upon the subject who is the spectator? Whatever answer we give to this question, I shall argue that it parallels a question asked by Lacan when he reflected on the idea of affect—what is the relation of the signifier to the body? For if we are to pursue the issue theoretically, it will be no use posing questions at the level of how artworks influence our ideas and emotions. We will find that a precise mechanism links the relation of object and spectator and that of signifier and body. It is that of embodiment, and it concerns a particular relation of the subject to jouissance. I will show how this relation is unraveled in the work of Thomas Demand and Hiroshi Sugimoto.

I What does it mean to say that there has been a change in affect, a change in the subject’s relation to the body? What is decisive is that it is the signifier that produces affect through its effect of and on the body. If affect can leave traces in the body, it is because of the prior fact that the signifier can be embodied. Such traces are the traces of the trauma of signifying events. It follows that Lacan’s account of affect is a special account of embodiment. Signifier and trauma had already been indissolubly linked. In an earlier period Lacan might have described the entry into language as the operation of the symbolic par excellence. But even in this version the entry into language, for all that it founds the symbolic, is still inexorably traumatic. In any case, for Lacan the signifier gradually acquired a greater indepen- dence from its signified, and one of its functions is to produce out of the living organism a body that is the domain of affect. Central to Lacan’s thought is the idea that animals do not have bodies. The body should not be conflated with the biophysical substrate of the individual; rather it is the appalling corporeal consequence of the entry into language. Because the body is not a given, has no original state or integrity, then logically one might say that any effect upon the body is always a mutilation; that is, a change. I make this provocative statement in order to challenge the humanist

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 assumption that there is always a body in reality, a body in its integrity that is the norm and another that is pathologically transformed through mutilation. By contrast I say that at a theoretical level the body exists only in its mutilation. This relation between the signifier and the body is what Jacques-Alain Miller calls “the embodiment of the signifier.” Perhaps some examples will help to make this graspable. Watching TV, I saw an old white woman who had been active in the early days of the civil rights movement. She said that someone had come up to her and spat on her face. Drawing her finger slowly across that face, she said the incident occurred forty years ago and she could still feel it. In Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon talks of struggling against a “historico- racial schema” provided “by the other, the white man, who had woven me out of a thousand details, anecdotes, stories.” Then the experience, “Mama, see the Negro! I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!”1 Fanon describes this as the collapse of the dis- embodied subject that he had been attempting to be until then. Suddenly he became responsible for his body, his race, and his ancestors. He acceded to his blackness. Fanon received his jouissance from the Other, a point that becomes clear when we consider what Lacan said about the embodied dialectic of subject and Other in his 1969–1970 seminar, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Lacan argued that the proposition “A Child Is Being Beaten,”2 of the eponymous masochistic fantasy, has effects of jouissance, not of truth. As Miller puts it, “one understands that its effect is an affect. We have there a signifying element, but the whole effect is of embodying itself as affect, and this affect is jouissance.”3 At stake here is the circulation of affect between the subject and the Other. Lacan uses the first phase of the fantasy where the father is beating another child to introduce the jouissance of the father, and he uses the second “silent” phase of the fantasy (the one, where the child itself is being beaten by the father, that his patients do not recall) to insist that the child in question is that half of the divided subject linked to enjoyment. He argues that the child is receiving its own message in inverted form. The child receives its own enjoyment in the form of the enjoyment of the Other. We now have a dialectic of subject and Other that is, as Miller points out, an embodied dialectic. Interestingly, this must also mean that the Other who does not exist nevertheless has a body. Lacan makes the signifying function operate as that which causes bodies rather than Nature. Let us think a bit more about “embodiment.” Clearly it is not a fixed entity but a category. When I say embodied, perhaps you wish to hear something finally definite, finally concrete, and finally belonging to the domain of reality. You will be disap- pointed. For me the category of embodiment is itself purely

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 preliminary and must be justified by all the possible forms of embodiment that would resonate within a psychoanalytic expectation. We could initially speak of embodiment in at least three registers: imaginary, symbolic, and real. Let us imagine these in a schematic fashion as three different modalities of mutilating and therefore precipitating the body. The first, which corresponds most closely to the popular and psychiatric conception of mutilation, occurs when an unmedi- ated coexistence of the mind and body produces uncontrollable anxiety. The so-called mutilation, physical cutting, constitutes a desperate attempt by the subject to ground a reality for existence. Let us call this individual, pathological cutting “imaginary embodiment.” Ritual scarring within a cultural tradition would be symbolic embodiment. The idea of real embodiment is less familiar. The very idea of embodiment that causes jouissance to flow functions at the level of the real. But just as the imaginary and symbolic embodiments are an attempt to deal with jouissance through the imaginary and the symbolic, a real embodiment also seeks to deal with jouissance at the level of the real, the level of jouissance itself. Joel-Peter Witkin’s relation to his scarred photographic surfaces is to be understood through a late Lacanian text on James Joyce and his writing.4 The 1975 seminar Le Sinthome 5 describes Joyce’s writing as a way of regulating jouissance that lies outside psychoanalysis. Joyce does not relate to the body of the Other. In the seminar we find the signifier made flesh through the particular embodiment in which Joyce makes himself into a book (se faire être un livre). He writes, says Joyce himself in Finnegan’s Wake, on the only foolscap available, his own body.6 Joyce writes what is for him a solution to the failure of the paternal metaphor. He transforms jouissance itself into a solution! He conjoins the problem and the solution. The original disturbance of the Joycean body is dealt with by what Lacan calls “a writing in the real.”7 Usually the signifier finds its support in the body while retaining its symbolic and imaginary functions. Here these are seriously under- mined by the insistence on the jouissance side of the signifier. Different discourses operate on the body and make jouissance flow. Unlike individual, pathological cutting, ritual scarring constitutes the embodiment of the dominant culture. But both produce affect in the body. The scarring of Joel-Peter Witkin’s canvases, precisely by being outside the realm of the Other, constitutes an embodiment that itself is a bizarre solution to the problem of affect. The subject’s relation to jouissance is altered at the level of real embodiment. A different kind of alteration is more usually seen in the practice of psychoanalysis. Lacan points to this when he puns on the word jouissance. Psychoanalysis can produce jouis-sens, sense in meaning; it allows for a certain taming but also a

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 preservation of jouissance in meaning. It is a discourse that mediates the pain of jouissance while keeping you connected to your body. In each case we’ve been speaking of, the signifier is embodied. This means that the subject of the signifier and the subject of jouissance can no longer be separated from each other. Indeed Lacan was insisting by the 1970s that the signifier itself had two sides, that of meaning and that of jouissance. This is a necessary corollary to the theory of affect and allows us to think about the subject’s implication in the social. Chains of signifiers do not concern meaning alone but make jouissance flow in the body. Moreover the analysis of these chains can unknot them and can affect the subject’s relation to jouissance. Psychoanalysis is not the only discourse that alters the subject’s relation to jouissance. Art, too, deals with affect and has a significant effect on the signifier and its relation to jouissance. We might think of the social and the political as traces of trauma within the body and of an art that separates jouissance from the body, making an opening for new embodiments of the signifier. Perhaps the way in which political discourse affects the artist is equivalent to the symptom that the original trauma of the signifier introduces. William Kentridge, the South African artist, refers to the Rock of apartheid, something he knows is not possible to approach directly in his work. Nonetheless, Kentridge works on the affect that the system of apartheid introduces into the body. The artistic solution, like the analytic one, is to separate the sense effect from the jouissance effect of the signifier. The task is that of isolating jouissance, making it more amenable through the signifier. Rosalind Krauss makes an argument about Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection: Mine that pits the end product, the animation film, against the increasing “weight” of a palimpsest of drawings in charcoal that are the subject matter of the film. She notes that Kentridge insists the exhibition of the drawings occur at the same time the film is shown.8 This is exactly about the separation of signifier and jouissance. The jouissance effects of the signifier are made manageable in this way, leaving room for new arrangements of the signifier. Art also has another way to deal with jouissance, as in the case of Joyce.

II Change in the subject’s relation to the object does not usually take such an obdurate character. I want to suggest how different artistic mediums effect different solutions to the problem of affect even when we remain short of the prosthetic nature of the Joycean solution. Kentridge’s art is an example of a psychoanalytic type of solution, jouis-sens. Hiroshi Sugimoto and Thomas

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 Demand cannot be located quite so easily within the psychoanalytic model, nor do they fit the model of the sinthome. In both artists chains of signifiers unravel, but something else requires analysis. What these two artists have in common (other than the fact that both take photographs) might not be immedi- ately obvious. Both destabilize the workings of the photographic index and its effects by driving a wedge between the signifier and its imaginary/symbolic function. Changing the subject’s relation to jouissance is something the artist does. This means he or she changes the subject’s relation to the object. The subject initially relates to an object that, in its fantasmatic aspect, holds out a promise of satisfaction, of completion. Any social object is contaminated in this way for the subject; an object is anything but itself. Of course the object fails to satisfy; it can only cover lack. In Demand’s and Sugimoto’s work, however, the object promises nothing and hides nothing. Each artist has a particular way of working. Each creates a specific mode that does not always affect the spectator in the same way. Demand makes his models from paper, every leaf on a tree, every architectural detail, every object, be it a chair, a bed, a bowl, or the multiple acoustic tiles of a sound lab. His world is paper and his pictures have titles such as Archive, Thomas Demand. Balkone/Balconies, 1997. Copyshop, Drafting Room. His work involves the painstaking C-Print/Diasec, 150 x 128 cm. fabrication of sculptures, life-size rooms made of cardboard © Thomas Demand, VG Bild and paper that are then photographed at a scale of 1:1. The Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. paper room itself has been modeled on photographs of actual Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York. rooms or other pictorial material that he finds in the media, or on his own ideas of rooms. In Demand’s work the speciﬁc mechanism is a destabilization of the object. But what does object mean in this context? First the everyday object, but also the photographic object. So Demand’s work under- mines the function of the object in Lacan’s terms. That object would function in a normal photograph to make it a photograph of an object. Lacan bedeviled this situation by insisting that the object was both a hole and the covering for a hole from the point of view of the subject’s desire. The object may be indexical from the point of view of optics, but it is a specter from the point of view of the psyche. Normality turned out to be an object lesson in revealing the imaginary identiﬁcations with

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 which the subject devoured the image. But in Demand’s photographs, where the situation is not normal, the Lacanian inter- pretation falls. In Demand’s work an object is just an object. It does not hide anything, and it is not a substitute for another object. He has overcome that ocular-centeredness that Bernhard Waldenfels speaks of, a distortion of our perception that he says “is based on a misjudgement of our eyes that lets seeing become absorbed in the event.”9 How does Demand strip away the social and the fantasmatic to conjure an object as little distorted by our perception as it might be? How does he enable us to see the object without its symbolic accretions? If fantasmatic objects are necessary, it is culture that fills out those objects. The object must then be divorced from the symbolic (cultural). Demand corrects the misjudgment of our eyes. His pictures involve a different perception in which the object gaze seems to play little part. Could it be that these are pictures without the gaze? Can it be that it is not the object gaze but the common or garden object itself that appears, for real. Régis Durand says of Demand’s work, As photographs they capture some part of their subject’s energy, its dull, obstinate, mysterious presence. Something was there, and they are linked to this object, its name, its meaning, its history . . . but nothing in these images vibrates; they do not elicit any projected desire or presence on our part. The space is entirely saturated, without depth and

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 with no hint of anything outside it. . . . [T]his saturation, this slightly suffocating dullness, is at the heart of the artist’s intentions. For, beneath their varying formal appear- ances, the underlying tonality of these works remains the same: there is the same saturation of motifs, the same unnat- ural light—a light that is only meant to give some sense of volume to the objects without suggesting any depth of ﬁeld.10

First, the idea that something was there—an object, its name, its meaning, and its history—to which the photograph is linked— such a connection is a feature of Demand’s work. He works with photographic representations from archives or from images he Opposite: Thomas Demand. constructs for himself. Quite often he works with a media Zeichensaal/Drafting Room, 1 image of some notoriety; for example, his picture Bathroom. 1996. C-Print/Diasec, 183 ⁄2 x 285 cm. © Thomas Demand, VG What was the “something” that was there? It was a newspaper Bild Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights photograph of a dead politician in the bathtub of a Geneva Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York. hotel, a photograph that was sent to the newspapers even before the matter was investigated; it caused a political furor. Below: Thomas Demand. Badezimmer/Bathroom, 1997. But Demand was not the photographer. And no dead politician C-Print/Diasec, 160 x 122 cm. appears in his picture. But by using the image that was in cir- © Thomas Demand, VG Bild culation, he modeled the bathroom in three dimensions, in Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. paper, and then he photographed that model under particular Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York. light conditions that give “some sense of volume to the objects without suggesting any depth of field.” Demand lights his pictures evenly, care- fully, so that there are no shadows. There are no signs of use. The paper is always blank and has no texture—something he achieves by controlling the scale of the models. (The models of interiors are life- size, and those of exteriors are the size of the printed photograph.) What is he doing? Office shows a room with paper all over the place and the cupboards empty. Office also contains “something” from before—the storming of the Stasi offices by citizens anxious to retrieve the files on themselves. The paper is blank and allows, as Demand points out, for the complete isomorphism of the signifier and the signified. A sheet of paper is indeed where signifier and signified meet. It is a sheet of paper, and it is made of paper. The particular event does not matter; still less is it the subject matter of the work. Rather Demand shows how the “something” from before completely grasps and enfolds the objects of the

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 representation so that they are irreversibly framed as an event. Newspapers speak of the camera catching the “event.” In truth the event captures the camera and the objects of its photography. Demand’s object is what we are calling “just an object” and is detached from the object gaze and desire. Lacan vividly pre- sented the opposite in relation to Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. He insisted that the picture is not just about the space of geometry but about the space of desire; indeed, he introduced the gaze in this context. So Lacan specifically links the function of the gaze with the very depth of field that is miss- ing from Demand’s pictures. Lacan writes in seminar XI, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, That which is light looks at me, and by means of that light in the depth of my eye, something is painted . . . something that is an impression, the shimmering of a surface that is not, in advance, situated for me in its distance. Below: Thomas Demand. Office, 1 This is something that introduces what was elided in the 1995. C-Print/Diasec, 183 ⁄2 x geometral relation—the depth of field, with all its ambi- 240 cm. © Thomas Demand, VG Bild Kunst, Bonn/Artists 11 guity and variability, which is in no way mastered by me. Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York. A little later Lacan says, “[That] which is gaze is always a play 12 Opposite, top: Hiroshi Sugimoto. of light and opacity.” In the light conditions of Demand’s 246 Metropolitan, LA, 1993. 3 1 work, little is left of this gaze, which suggests that little is left Gelatin silver print, 16 ⁄4 x 21 ⁄14 in. of either desire or affect. © Hiroshi Sugimoto. You will probably recognize Sugimoto’s movie screen filled Opposite, bottom: with light and emptied of image in the half-light of an audito- Hiroshi Sugimoto. North Atlantic Ocean, Cliffs of Moher, 1989. 3 rium’s rich, complex detail or framed by the foliage of the drive- Gelatin silver print, 47 x 58 ⁄4 in. in movie setting. © Hiroshi Sugimoto.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 Sugimoto goes on photographing these screens—often in plain, contemporary theaters, but the screen of white light is always there, there where the film’s images should be. Something paradoxical is occurring. Where the image should be we see nothing but white light; yet where we expect the darkness of an auditorium, we see rich and glowing architectural detail. It is a matter of exposure time. Sugimoto leaves his camera on for the duration of the ﬁlm—at the end of which the image has drowned in light, and the dark surroundings have yielded a positive image. These pictures surprise as do the other series he makes—the long exposures of seas across the world, the dioramas, the out-of-focus photographs of famous buildings. This surprise reaches its peak in a series of portraits of Henry VIII and his six wives. What is the spectator seeing? Photographs or paintings? If photographs, then why do they look not quite right? All are in splendid monochrome, with Henry on the end wall and the six wives lined up along the long wall. We know who these people are—we’ve seen the paintings in the history books. But Sugimoto hasn’t photographed the paintings. He has photographed models that are themselves based on the paintings. The models are three-dimensional, made

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 of wax, and housed at Madame Tussaud’s waxworks in London. It is as though the dead had been brought to the light of photography. Sugimoto proudly claims to be the ﬁrst to photograph Anne Boleyn—at a distance of ﬁve centuries. What is it that is different about the way we are made to see? Surely the object gaze is brought to the fore. Light is looking at us, light in the form of the screen, the universe, the building. In the case of the portraits of the Tudors, it’s a little more compli- cated—here there is light through all the variations of these splendid monochrome photographs. These long-dead people have come to light. Lacan, speaking of Holbein’s The Ambassadors, with the famous anamorphic skull, draws attention to the anni- hilation of the subject made visible and adds, “it is further still that we must seek the function of vision. We shall then see emerging on the basis of vision, not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsatile, daz- zling and spread out function, as it is in this picture.”13 There also, in Henry VIII and His Wives is the Lacanian gaze in all its scintillating glory spread across the picture. Sugimoto has photographed the gaze.

Demand found a way to exclude the gaze and desire from his Below: Hiroshi Sugimoto. work. Sugimoto, to the contrary, isolates the gaze. Yet his pic- Caribbean Sea, Jamaica, 1980. 3 tures also appear deprived of the movement constitutive of Gelatin silver print, 47 x 58 ⁄4 in. desire. In an interview with Kerry Brougher in 1993, he said © Hiroshi Sugimoto. that the sea is “an early example of a human naming something Opposite: Hiroshi Sugimoto. Catherine of Aragon, 1999. 14 3 outside the world inside himself.” In a later interview with Gelatin silver print, 58 ⁄4 x 47 in. Thomas Kellein, Sugimoto claimed that his seascapes have © Hiroshi Sugimoto.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 to do with the idea of ancient man, facing the sea and giving a name to it. Naming things has something to do with human awareness, from the separation of the entire world from you. . . . I was thinking about the most ancient human impressions. The time when the ﬁrst man named the world around him, the sea.15

Sugimoto’s desire manifests itself at the point that we might call the origin of desire in the scopic ﬁeld. Think of Condillac’s marble statue and how it comes to life. Once endowed with all the senses except for that of touch, the statue still has no sense of the world outside itself. The addition of touch allows the statue both to feel itself as one thing and to register things as outside itself. This makes a difference in the scopic field. At first the statue sees (voir), but what it sees is not yet separate from it. A certain distance is required in order that the statue look (regarder) and perceive what it sees as something other than itself; the sense of touch allows this. Alenka Zupancic

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 describes this part of Condillac’s experiment by referring to the Lacanian gaze and the birth of the subject at the cost of its expulsion.

A statue confined to the sense of sight . . . —insofar as everything outside it is just its own “mode of being” . . . sees its own gaze. . . . Now the touch has to teach it how to look. . . . The statue, being at ﬁrst nothing but a part of a net composed of rays and sparkling colors, now emerges as an eye, as the organ of sense. The organ replaces and “expels” the gaze, and this “minimal operation” makes the statue see as we do: from now on the statue, as all the other mortals, has eyes in order not to see.16

The price of this expulsion is the loss of the object, the loss that now and for evermore sets off desire. Sugimoto’s seascapes are themselves at this very moment of separation—on the one hand, the symbolic with its camera poised to take a photograph of the sea and, on the other, the unnamed sea glimpsed through the iridescence of the photograph. Sugimoto succeeds in pro- ducing a photograph that is as though he were the ﬁrst man to name the sea that lay, pristine, in its ﬁrst separation before him. Somehow, the moment before and the moment after the loss of the object coexist side by side in this work as the incarnation of Hiroshi Sugimoto. Guggenheim Museum, New York (Frank Lloyd a moment. The sea exists as though at the moment before it is Wright), 1997. Gelatin silver print, 3 seen, before representation, and at the same time the gaze in 58 ⁄4 x 47 in. © Hiroshi Sugimoto. its spread-out function, the gaze as that which allows the sea to be sea. Sugimoto catches the moment of the birth of subject and object. Subject and object are poised at the edge of the narrative that will both divide and link them. Isn’t this what is happening with the movie theater pictures too? Sugimoto talks of the “emptiness” of these images.17 It is as though you saw all the screens but were not separated from them. Indeed they are emptied of narrative and in its stead there is the gaze, the whiteness of the screen that looks at you. The reduction of separation is the reduction of desire. The presence of the gaze in Sugimoto’s work is not a decisive fac- tor in the comparison with Demand despite the absence of the gaze in Demand’s work. What is important is

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 that both artists destabilize the index. Somehow the index is the Real of photographic theory; it is the rock-solid referent that is supposed to be made of a different stuff than representation. Sugimoto knows that the referent is the Real, but he also knows that the Real as referent is impossible. He glimpses the referent in its constant retreat, its resistance to capture. He destabilizes the index, first through the technique of long exposure, then with the lens set at infinity (in the architectural series), and finally and most memorably in the portraits of Henry and his serial wives. Sugimoto reduces the gap between subject and object to a minimum. With Demand’s paper constructions the destabilization of the index is achieved through the substitution of the everyday object. His work, unlike Sugimoto’s, tends toward the neutral- ization of objects. The original room is not given to us in the usual way through representation and nor is the paper room. We see neither the culturally perceived object nor a paper room. As spectators we perceive the photograph of the paper room as a photograph of a real room, but not quite. That is essential. A room is a room, and a paper room is a paper room. The picture has produced a split between the two. If the two rooms are not the same, it is because something has been sub- tracted from the original one. They look similar, but one is a functional room, and the other is a sculpture of the room. The paper room is a real room, yet it relates to the original object in such a way that its meaning is lost. We are confronted by the object, pure and simple, shorn of its particularity, its “interest.” If there is an index here—the scene that is “captured” in the photograph—it nonetheless has little correspondence to what is seen by the spectator. There is no simple referent. Paradoxically, the object that is there is the very thing that puts the index into question. For it is no longer a secure object, saturated with meanings that locate both it and us, physically and psychically. The object does not appear in the gap of the real. With this object there is no gap between the real and reality. This object does not stand in for something else. This object stands, and it isn’t the referent of representation. Does Sugimoto’s work raise the question of such an object? In the case of the movie theaters and some seascapes, the picture is taken over a long period of time. The long exposure allows us to describe the work as an overlay of representations. The Henry VIII series is more difficult to place. With the three- dimensional wax “sculptures” it seems to be quite close to Demand’s setup in its relation to pictorial representation. And yet its effect is very different. Where Demand’s pictures are inert and unpeopled, the paste jewelry of the Tudor brides scin- tillates. And yet again the dead do not come alive. This is not a faint flicker of life; rather it marks the definitively dead. Though

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 it might not have attained the neutrality of the Demandian object, Sugimoto’s work does put considerable strain on the notion of object. Both artists have reached the point where the object is substantially shorn of its imaginary/symbolic accretions. It is not just that they change the relation to the object by unraveling chains of meaning and altering the relation to jouissance. For this is not the psychoanalytic solution of jouis-sens, enjoyment in meaning, which keeps you connected to your body. But neither does it offer the prosthetic solution of the sinthome. What Demand and Sugimoto do is to make it difﬁcult for the viewer to replace one object with another. For they have put the status of the object into question through the destabilization of the index. The object no longer protects us from the real.

III The discussion of the effects of Demand’s photographs is par- alleled by the direct effects of the paper models he makes. If the photographic effects of the paper model lead toward the disembodiment of the viewer, the architectural effect is also one of disembodiment. What Demand says about the sculpture version of his work—the paper rooms that he constructs—is instructive: “The funny thing is that when you have ﬁnished a place like that and it is there in front of you on a scale of 1:1 you walk through it as if you were in a computer simulation. Essentially you no longer exist.”18 Baffled, I asked Demand what he meant and received the following reply: When the piece (its sculptural form) is finished one can walk through the space and experience something weird in the sense of physically not carrying weight, but at the same time one has to be very careful because the possible destruction of the surrounding by your physicality (don’t want to make it too pathetic, but in other words walking into the paper structure would spoil it, sitting on a chair would destroy it, etc.) keeps you very aware of yourself. You feel like not existing but only as long as you are extremely careful in your movements: that means very existing. Does that make sense?19 Surely this is about disembodiment. The sculpture has two fea- tures: ﬁrst that it is made of paper; and second that it is a room or an architectural feature such as a staircase. Demand separates the sculptures and the photographs from their referents and does so by divesting the latter of their stories, their histo- ries. But he also divests architecture of its power to embody. In both cases the subject is divested of its symbolic ties. How do I justify such a reading? Consider the following passage by

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 Mark Wigley, from a collection of essays entitled After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City. Wigley does not use the term embodiment, but that is what he is talking about. Architecture is embodied. The subject submits to it as to other discourses of culture. To lose a building is to lose not simply an object that you have been living in or looking at but an object that has

Thomas Demand. Lift, 2005. been watching over you. And when our witnesses disap- C-Print/Diasec, 190 x 150 cm. pear, something of the reality of our life goes with them. © Thomas Demand, VG Bild People are really grieving for themselves when they grieve Kunst, Bonn/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. for buildings. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York. This . . . depends on a kind of kinship between body

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 and building . . . buildings . . . must be themselves a kind of body; a surrogate body, a superbody with a face, a façade, that watches us.20

This reminds us of the necessity of attributing to the Other, who does not exist, a body. Wigley has understood that the dialectic of subject and Other is embodied and that the building is the Other with a body. Demand’s paradoxical reply to my question tries to make sense of his own response to his paper building. His response can be understood by considering disembodiment. When Demand enters one of his rooms, he must be careful in his movements. He doesn’t exist, must not exist, for the paper world to continue to exist. The room is so far from Wigley’s idea of a “surrogate body” that it allows of no identification and consequently makes Demand’s body seem unfamiliar to him—he feels he doesn’t exist. On the other hand, he claims that simultaneously he does exist precisely by virtue of having to be “extremely careful” in his movements. Because his body becomes foreign to him in the unfamiliar space of a paper room, he is thrown back upon his own tactility, a tactility not coordinated through the body of the Other. We, as viewers of Demand’s pictures of paper rooms, experience, albeit differently, something of this disembodiment. At the level of the scopic drive, our relation to existence is given by the alteration of the function of the gaze. If Demand’s pictures lack the gaze, we find ourselves in a field outside signification, the Other, and desire. This moment alters the viewer’s relation to the jouissance of the body that was, in the first place, a product of signification and a relation to the body of the Other.

IV The discourses that effect symbolic and imaginary embodiment privilege the side of sense of the signiﬁer. Psychoanalytic discourse on the other hand tips the scales to the side of the jouissance of the signifier and produces jouis-sens, enjoyment in meaning. It does this by isolating the object around which sig- niﬁers turn and turn. In Demand’s work and in Sugimoto’s, the means whereby the object is isolated result in a different relation between sense and enjoyment: less sense and more enjoyment. Yet this is not an abandonment to jouissance. Demand produces a picture of something that we cannot name or fanta- size about. This effect of the object (that it doesn’t offer anything or hide anything) has an accompanying affect (due to the destabilization of the object)—not violent, not uncanny, neither alive nor dead. Demand has materialized the being of the object. Such a materialization protects us, of course, from the deadly effects of unbridled jouissance. To paraphrase Alenka Zupancic: to be

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 able to enjoy your enjoyment, you must be able to elude its grasp.21 Demand has his own way of making the Real of desire accessible. In Demand’s work we are confronted with something that does not fall neatly into our habitual categories of thought and experience. It is too easy to experience something new and then transform it and conﬁne it by describing it in the same old way. I believe we do this in relation to a great deal of contemporary art that bases itself on particular relations to jouissance. I hope that I have conveyed something of the experience of Demand’s pictures in their particularity. The task of doing this for others remains.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152638106775434422 by guest on 27 September 2021 Notes 1. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952; reprint, London: Paladin, 1970), 79. 2. Sigmund Freud, “‘A Child Is Being Beaten’: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions” (1919), in Standard Edition XVII. The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1974), 179–204. 3. Jacques-Alain Miller, “The Symptom and the Body Event,” trans. B.P. Fulks, lacanian ink 19 (2001): 46. 4. Parveen Adams, “‘Se faire être une photographie’: The Work of Joel- Peter Witkin,” in Art: Sublimation or Symptom, ed. Parveen Adams (New York: Other Press, 2003), 164–180. See also Parveen Adams, “Art and Prosthesis: Cronenberg’s ‘Crash,’” in Art, ed. Adams, 147–163. 5. Jacques Lacan, Le Seminaire XXIII, Le Sinthome, 1975–1976 (Paris: Seuil, 2005). 6. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake (1939; reprint, London: Penguin, 1992), 185–186. 7. Lacan, Le Seminaire XXIII, Le Sinthome 8. Rosalind Krauss, “‘The Rock’: William Kentridge’s Drawings for Projection” October 92 (Spring 2000): 3–35. 9. Quoted in Stefan Gronert, “Reality Is Not Totally Real,” in Grosse Illusionen, Demand—Gursky—Ruscha (Bonn: Kunstmuseum, 1999), 23. 10. Régis Durand, “Tracings,” in Thomas Demand (London: Thames and Hudson 2000), 87. 11. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1977), 96. 12. Lacan, Psychoanalysis, 96. 13. Lacan, Psychoanalysis, 89. 14. Hiroshi Sugimoto, interview by Kerry Brougher, in Sugimoto, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1993). 15. Hiroshi Sugimoto, interview by Thomas Kellein, in Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Exposed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 92. 16. Alenka Zupancic, “Philosophers’ Blind Man’s Buff” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, ed. Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press 1996), 43; emphasis in original. 17. Hiroshi Sugimoto, in conversation with the author in his New York studio a few years ago. 18. Quoted in Ulrike Schneider, “Model,” in Thomas Demand (Hannover: Sprengel Museum, 2001), 37. 19. Thomas Demand, e-mail message to the author, 2002. 20. Mark Wigley, “Insecurity by Design,” in After the World Trade Center: Rethinking New York City, ed. Michael Sorkin and Sharon Zukin (New York: Routledge, 2002), 71. 21. Alenka Zupancic, The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 181.

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