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Kelley, Dunham, Breuning
[excerpt]

 

 

Cathy Lebowitz interviews Josefina Ayerza

 

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The Wolfman I
J-A MILLER

Reducing the Sophist to Silence
ALAIN BADIOU

The Jouissance Program…
ERIC LAURENT

Freud and the Object…
P-G GUÉGUEN

The Universal Eye…
GÉRARD WAJCMAN

Transcendental Black Metal
HUNTER HUNT-HENDRIX

Leave the Screen Empty!
SLAVOJ ZIZEK

Mike Kelley,
Carroll Dunham,
Olaf Breuning
JOSEFINA AYERZA

Kelley image

Cathy Lebowitz: So the image of the woman with a phallus, wherever it may appear, makes you think of this dream?

Josefina Ayerza: Kelley’s women with the phallus painted over their belly, in between the legs, on the breast… made me think of this dream by way of illustration. Woman wants to be the phallus—it is for that which she is not that she wishes to be desired as well as loved. “But she finds the signifier of her own desire in the body of him to whom she addresses her demand for love.” A substitute figure for the male sexual organ, it will detach. By now it is a signifier, a lack. The fact that the phallus is a signifier means that it is in the place of the Other… However veiled, it is this desire of the Other as such that the subject must come to recognize.
Kelley’s frogs croak and puff themselves up with air, they want to have it. The swelling amplifying the sounds made by the frogs’ vocal chords, they croak to attract female frogs for breeding. If the phallus doesn’t belong to neither of them it is because it belongs to both. For Lacan, the organ invested with this signifying function takes on the value of a fetish.


Kelley image

Dunham-Breuning image




Art:
Mike Kelley
Naked Majas (Bettelheims' Genital) - acrylic on canvas, wood, enamel, 2008-2009
Two Henrys - acrylic on canvas, 2009.

courtesy Gagosian Gallery, NYC.

Olaf Breuning
Yes / No - wall drawing, 2009
courtesy Metro Pictures, NYC.

Carroll Dunham
(Hers) Night and Day #1 - acrylic on canvas, 2009
courtesy Barbara Gladstone Gallery, NYC.

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