She was English. I had first met her years ago in a French city at the elegant apartment-gallery of a friend, a collector and dealer, in connection with an exhibition of her paintings. She came for breakfast on her way to the airport. But I remember she was late, and breakfast became a flurry of half-drunk coffee and heartfelt exchanges as the taxi waited below to take her to some other place where, I imagined, someone else would meet her in some other apartment, in some other country, over a breakfast much like this one.
She is English, and she is Torie Begg. We have met many
times in the years since. But first impressions last, and I find myself
returning to that morning and the reflections that crossed between artist
and work. Impossible to catch then, intriguing to consider now. Central to
the intrigue is a word: apparently. It is the modifier Torie Begg has
attached to various colours in titling her ‘painted objects’, and, on
reflection , it has come to mark the ground that held my fascination.
Is it admission or critique? Regret or dismissal? Conviction or acceptance?
Where would I begin? I can begin here: like Jane Austin, Torie Begg presents
a façade of conventional desire behind which she represents a central
condition of that desire: the impossibility of its self-admission. Puzzled
by my own reactions to the work, puzzled, that is, by the sense of
flirtation that I experience from a project that seems so determined, both
in its evidence and in Begg’s discussions on it, I catch myself attempting
to lift the veil, to see that which has been forbidden for me to touch. That
attempt requires alibis, and I want to test a few against the possibility of
that touch.
The Determined Project
‘I deal with paint as matter, as something with body, making a
three-dimensional "thing" using paint not as a pictorial element but as a
building material.’ (Torie Begg, Contemporary Art, winter 1995) ‘It is
through the cracks that you see things.’ (Torie Begg in conversation with
the author, 2000)
Before the alibi comes the event, and the event here is one characterised by the artist as a form of architecture, a construction or ‘building up’, an edifice whose final corporality has been elaborated unsentimentally through strategies designed to remove the architect from the architecture, the painter from the painting, or, more broadly and with Yeats’s famous question in mind, ‘the dancer from the dance’. Interestingly, this architecture is independent of material support. While Begg has employed the ‘natural’ painting support of canvas, stretched and then restretched to define the surface as a field inclusive of its edge, she has enrolled as well such unconventional supports as shoes, bricks, mattress springs, and so on. The point is made: it is not the support that is of value, it is the event, the architecture, not the building. And the point is extended to that other natural support, the space within which the painting exists, when Begg arranges her ‘things’ into spatial installations that insist on their eventfulness in contradistinction from the space in which they are housed.
If, in other words, there is at play here a de-materialisation, it is one that directs itself to that abidingly eroticised anticipation of the figure that lies behind the veil, beneath or beyond the surface, at the core: the bride stripped bare, even, one might have said. If, therefore, there is to be any lifting of the veil, anything to be touched, there will have to be an account of that other event, present as an exclusion, implied in Begg’s sly insertion of ‘apparent’ within a tradition of painting that would elevate truth over appearance. It is this disturbance that provokes the counter-event which, as Near-Eastern cultures have always known, exists simply in anticipation, in implication, or rather in ‘being-implicated’, in absence as presence. Begg’s determined project, then, is to assemble a cover story whose disrobing can only call into question the act of disrobing as anticipation itself. How to tell the dancer from oneself? Dangerous territory for the incautious, and the first alibi must involve some assertions on the nature of reality.
The First Alibi: The Real as Residue
Conventional notions of adequation, often called truth, such as that if it
looks black it is black, depend on what Lacan refers to as reality, the
amalgamation of image and symbol, or, to be more precise, amalgamation of
the self-identifying realms of the imaginary and the symbolic. But if such
is the case, truth is inadequate. That is, there is a crucial difference
between reality and ‘the real’, and this can be sum-marised in two ways.
Firstly, it is widely accepted that it is impossible to access in any direct
manner the ‘real world’, that which lies outside us, because our only means
of doing so are limited to the senses and the symbolic structure of
language. Nonetheless, as Freud noted with respect to the phallus, our
apprehen-sion of an object includes its absence: its ‘realness’ exceeds its
reality, or we could say that the real exceeds or is in excess of reality
and its constituents, meaning and signification. The Real is that which is
excluded from our reality. Lacan calls this excess ‘residue’. Torie Begg
calls it ‘apparent’.
Secondly, Lacan picks up on Freud’s proposal that an
obdurate ‘silent force’ exists in the human psyche that finds expression in
repetition and compulsion. Lacan refers to this force as jouissance which,
while often understood to mean a state of pleasurable ecstasy, he casts as
an intensity which lies outside the limits of reality and may be
characterised as an emergence of the residual Real, of ‘excess’. What is
significant about this is that as an individual forms a social identity,
jouissance is relegated to the permissable margins, primarily sexual
excitement. The Real in its residue and Sexuality in its abandonment become
linked. Torie Begg might call this the ‘crack’ in the crust of the surface.
The Second Alibi: The Palimpsest as Cover Story
A central aspect of Torie Begg’s work arises from and extends the ancient
expectation that painting mimics its referent. Imitation is a complicated
affair, and the mimetic tradition collapses that complication into realism,
roughly the terrain of what is popularly referred to as reality. Its
mischievous twin is mimicry, and it is this terrain that approximates Begg’s
project. Mimicry is a form of doubling in which imitation serves to both
copy and critique. Virginia Woolf remarked that Jane Austin’s mastery of
character description ‘stimulates us to supply what is not there’, and this
ability to so refine a surface as to invite its penetration is a device that
has been explored as a form of palimpsest. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar
are especially well known for having applied the term in reference to
women’s writings, for instance in Brontë’s Jane Eyre, and it is they who
have described the operation as a ‘cover story’. In a palimpsest there are
two levels of signification. One, the accessible surface convention, depicts
or imitates what we see.
The second involves the implications that we discover when we look through that surface to encounter a deeper, obscured meaning whose existence threatens to disrupt the very surface that provides our vantage point. It is in this respect that the palimpsest and the mimetic tradition converge as mimicry. And it is in this respect that Torie Begg’s assumption and separation of painting’s mechanics – on the one hand paint, layer upon layer of paint, and on the other any support, from canvas to bedsprings, that can hold the paint – converge as a cover story borrowed from the conventions of modern art for a body whose embodiment has been ‘flayed’, unstretched from its frame, re-ordered for us into a parody like bones in the Paris catacombs.
The Third Alibi: The Supplement, Derrida’s ‘shameful
other’
It could be said, indeed it has been1, that Torie Begg’s paintings are, in
effect, cancellations. This cancellation, in opening up a void, inevitably
constructs, in turn, the requirement of a compensation, and we could
therefore say that Torie Begg offers us painting as compensation.
Any compensation is supplemental to its absent or suspended reference, and this is how Jacques Derrida addresses the necessity of writing with respect to speech. Derrida can be mischievous himself, and in a famous passage directed at Rousseau he discusses the parallel necessity of masturbation as a supplement to intercourse, thereby slyly connecting language with sexuality. And there is more to it than mere necessity. As Rousseau himself admits, masturbation’s advantage over ‘natural relations’, and writing’s advantage over speech, lies in the possibility of greater articulation. The supplement is capable of a greater ‘presence’ than its privileged partner, or, to press the point more exquisitely, any naturalised convention carries an innate inadequacy for which it inevitably seeks a compen-satory presence in its ‘artificial’ twin. Moreover, supplements are extensions. If historical commentary can also be seen as supplemental to historical events, it is clear that there is a privilege of elaboration at play. Torie Begg, in cancelling painting, offers us a compensation that theatricalises and elaborates on painting’s processes, and in that process supplements painting with its own, superior, absent presence.
The Fourth Alibi: The Surplus
Look closely at a Torie Begg painting and you will find a ‘flaw’. This flaw
will take the form of a stray hair, or a flake of paint from the ceiling of
the studio, a corresponding accumulation of paint as Begg’s patient layers
succeed one another and invest the fault to move on. You may find this
distracting, and you will be correct. Consider this a surplus.
Consider this also a Text, as Barthes uses the term when he writes: ‘The Text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing; thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but to an explosion, a dissemination...’ The Text as a dissemination – the erotic word dramatises his point – is a weave of signifiers, meanings crossing over one another to form an infinite and playful metonymic chain of engagement. The Text offers a surplus or plenitude that yields not an aesthetic field of concentration, but an erotic field of multiplicity.
An erotic field of multiplicity is, of course, the terrain of feminist renegotiations of gendered difference. Irigaray suggests that women’s sexuality is distinguished by its capacity for multiple and heterogenous pleasure. It is auto-erotic and plural. And this extends to women’s language, non-linear, ‘incoherent’ to ‘male’ language centred on the logic of ‘reason’; a language one must listen to differently to hear an ‘other meaning’ constantly in the process of weaving itself. And Kristeva codifies this ‘other’ language as a semiotic chora that represents a feminine, though not necessarily female, libidinal energy that supplements as it simultaneously subverts the masculine symbolic order.
If painting is a field in which language is materialised, it is clear that those surplus stray bits of ‘apparently distracting’ detritus embedded within Torie Begg’s layered surfaces take on a central significance, ensuring an intimacy of infinite deferrals that disrupts the confines of the established order. An erotic disruption, quite apparently.
The Fifth Alibi: Marginalia
The fifth alibi would have taken as its text the concept of
overdetermination. Coined by Freud to evoke the multiplicity of causes that
determine any given dream, it has also been appropriated for Marxist
analysis by Althusser to suggest that any historical moment, like a dream,
can reveal many determinants, even if it is the economic that may in ‘the
last instance’ secure the fate of that moment. That alibi would have lifted
a particular veil to reveal the inevitable admiration that must be felt in
the presence of sheer virtuosity, the multi-faceted control over the means
of production that is the hallmark of an artist who is both profoundly
inventive and positioned to command the capital required to exercise that
invention. We can call it allure. A Torie Begg has allure.
But there is no need for the fifth alibi. Indeed, there was never a need for any alibis at all. I could never have been present, just as Torie Begg, the work, is absent too, lingering in the supplement, a residue between the lines drawn by gender and the Symbolic Order. Nor, therefore, need there be any excuse for a text that is, after all, itself a supplement, marginalia on a document for others to erase. Merely anticipations at the dance.
1 ‘The construction of the field by means of its own
cancellation signifies an engagement with, and subsequent erasure of, what
is left to painting after the nominal end of its history...’, Richard Dyer,
‘Reflexive/Iterative, Object/Painting: Karate Tactics and Decoy
Deconstruction in the Work of Torie Begg’, in Torie Begg – Apparently Grey
or is it Jello?, Galerie Eugen Lendl, Graz, 1998.
Torie Begg is at f a projects, London,
25 April – 8 June 2002.
www.faprojects.com
Ian Carr-Harris is an artist based in Toronto and is a correspondent editor for contemporary