In the 20th century, more than 3,500 philosophy programs—featuring the likes of Michel Foucault, Gaston Bachelard, and Gilles Deleuze—aired on French television, giving writers and philosophers a certain cultural cachet and a broad footprint. “Lacan, the exhibition. When art meets psychoanalysis,” a show at the Centre Pompidou-Metz, charts the impact of one such philosopher: Jacques Lacan, who was also a writer and psychoanalyst. His influence is widely felt in France and abroad, and in 1974, one of his 27 seminars, “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis,” aired on national television.
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The Metz show begins here, with an excerpt of that 11th seminar. The exhibition was conceived when two psychoanalysts, Paz Corona and Gérard Wajcman, approached curators Marie-Laure Bernadac and Bernard Marcadé seeking a way to exhibit Lacan’s ideas. “Our exhibition is not about psychoanalysis,” Bernadac says in the press kit, “but [is] an exhibition about Lacan’s relationship with works of art.” Lacan spoke often of artworks in his writing, and was a collector closely involved in France’s art world. He was friends with Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Dora Maar, all of whom are included in the show. He even treated Maar after she had a psychotic episode, and after that, she underwent another seven years of psychoanalysis with him.
Lacan collected works by the likes of Duchamp and Picasso, which he displayed proudly in his country home. But to be sure, the most iconic work of his collection, also on view, was Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde (1866); today, it is owned by the Musée d’Orsay. Famously, Lacan hid this detailed rendering of a vulva behind a sliding wooden door, onto which his friend (and eventual brother-in-law) André Masson painted his own Surrealist rendition. Masson added clouds that drift above an outline of L’Origine’s body, whose curves he recast as hills, her pubic hair resembling a bunch of flowers. L’Origine du Monde almost never leaves d’Orsay. But at the Pompidou-Metz, it no longer hangs alongside other 19th-century works, which often feel prudish in L’Origine’s presence. Instead, the curators have hung it beside more recent representations of vulvas—some of them direct retorts to the famous L’Origine—by the likes of Art & Language, Mircea Cantor, VALIE EXPORT, Victor Man, Betty Tompkins, and Agnès Thurnauer. Deborah de Robertis’s photograph hangs near L’Origine, showing a 2014 performance in which the artist, wearing a gold dress referring to the painting’s gilded frame, squatted in front of the work, spreading her legs wider than Courbet’s model topart her vagina, revealing what she calls “infinity,” or “the origin of the origin,” the depth that Courbet concealed.
Among the artworks Lacan engaged in his writing, where they often helped illustrate his philosophical ideas, is Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). In his 13th seminar, Lacan analyzed this piece—shown in Metz as a digital projection—at length, charting out a complicated schema as to how deeper realities emerge through reflection and projection. In this painting, Lacan points out, Velázquez shows the king and queen indirectly, reflected in a mirror at the far back of the scene.Near that projection hangs Velázquez’s painting Infanta Margarita Teresa (1659), loaned from the Louvre, where wall labels focus on the “secret object” that Lacan claimed to have found in that painting, referring to the slit in the middle of the Infanta’s dress. He saw this slit as visual evidence of Spaltung, or splitting, a concept originated by Freud. Lacan elaborated on this concept by claiming that language is what splits us into two parts: our unconscious and our ego, adding that language is thus insufficient to fully communicate who we are.
And of course, there is a section dedicated to the phallus. It contains mostly sculptural abstractions that beg phallic interpretations: Constantin Brancusi’s Princess X (1915–16), Man Ray’s Presse-papier à Priape (1920/1966), and two works by Louise Bourgeois: Janus Fleuri (1968) and Fillette (Sweeter Version) (1968–69). There are breast and shit sections too. For Lacan, these were all signifiers of desire, and the phallus especially signified what Lacan termed jouissance: the excitement associated with pleasure or pain. In the “jouissance” room, we see an excerpt from Andy Warhol’s film Blow Job (1964)—a close-up of a young man’s face as he’s fellated—near Bourgeois’s sculpture Arched Figure (1993), which depicts a headless male body lying supine with an arched back.
Another section is dubbed “the name of the father.” Lacan saw the father as symbolizing the laws and restrictions governing desire and communication. This section includes works confronting male power by French women artists including Sophie Calle, Camille Henrot, and Niki de Saint Phalle. An excerpt from Saint Phalle’s film Daddy (1972) concerns a father-daughter love-hate relationship very similar to her own: late in life, the artist revealed that she’d been sexually abused by her father. Another section, on trans identities, features rooms called “anatomy is not destiny” and “masquerade.” These include photographs by Nan Goldin and one by Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp dressed as his female alter ego Rrose Sélavy. While Lacan didn’t delve into trans-ness explicitly, he did insist on referring to “man” and “woman” not in terms of anatomical difference, but as playing symbolic roles in power structures—which is why still another section is titled after one more of Lacan’s famous phrases, “the woman does not exist,” by which he meant that she has no predetermined essence. Lacan, time and again, insisted that most things are malleable, and are more than meets the eye. It’s not hard, then, to see why his ideas have both appealed and owed to artists.