Art Journal

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Readymade, Found Object, Photograph

Margaret Iversen
To cite this article: Margaret Iversen (2004) Readymade, Found Object, Photograph, Art
Journal, 63:2, 44-57
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00043249.2004.10791125

Published online: 03 Apr 2014.

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Gabriel Orozco. Waiting Chairs, 1998.

Cibachrome. 16 x 20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 em),
Edition of 5. Courtesy of the artist and
Marian Goodman Gallery, NewYork.

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The 1936 Surrealist Exhibition ofObjects brought together a bewildering range of

items including natural objects, interpreted natural objects, incorporated natural
objects, found objects, perturbed objects, readymade objects, American objects,
Oceanic objects, mathematical objects, and Surrealist objects. I Of the nonethnographic types listed, only the readymade and the found object still retain any
currency, and the readymade can no longer be subsumed under the Surrealist
umbrella. Marcel Duchamp's readymade and Andre Breton's found object have
such different legacies that they now arguably constitute a categorical distinction. This was not so clear in the mid- 1930S when Breton could define readymades as "manufactured objects raised to the dignity of works of art through
the choice of the artist." 2 Yet, even now, the terms are still often run together
and used interchangeably. What I want to do in this paper is to drive a wedge
between them. We will find that their distinctiveness hinges on the kind of subjective relation each assumes. They turn out to embody different aspects of the
most influential account of what might be called the subjective dimension of
our relation to art-Immanuel Kant's conception of the aesthetic.
By setting the readymade and the found object in relation to aesthetic
theory, I aim to cut across the current tendency on the part of some critics to
invoke a vague conception of the beautiful in order to call into question postconceptual or postmodern trends in the arts and criticism. The aesthetic, I intend to show, is not exhausted
Margaret Iversen
by the concept of beauty. 3 Yet, at the same time, I want
to question the wisdom of these critics' opponents who
reaffirm the anti-aesthetic and denigrate the Kantian
tradition." What the strident debates pro- and antibeauty overlook is the continuity of certain aesthetic
attitudes and ideas that stretch from Kant through the
early avant-gardes and reemerge in contemporary art practices. Drawing out this
continuity is not done in the spirit of a nostalgic return to notions of beauty,
but rather as a way of deepening our understanding of contemporary practice
and theory. Owing to the work of influential artists such as Andy Warhol and Ed
Ruscha, the readymade's legacy has been largely photographic. In the latter part
of this paper, I take up the less familiar theme of the found object's photographic
legacy, focusing on the work of Mary Kelly and Gabriel Orozco.

Readymade, Found Object,

Photograph

I would like to thank Dawn Ades, Diarmuid

Costello, Briony Fer. Neil Cox. Stephen Melville.
and James Meyer for their thoughts and encouragement.

I. Exposition surreoliste d'objets, Galerie Ratton,

Paris, May, 1936. Andre Breton's account of the
exhibition in "Crisis of the Object" has a slightly
different set of categories. American and Oceanic
objects are included under the heading of Primitive and his list includes mobile objects. See
Breton, Surrealism and Painting, trans. S. W. Taylor
(London: MacDonald, 1972), 275-80.
2. Andre Breton, "Lighthouse of the Bride"
(1935), in Surrealism and Painting, 88.
3, If recent debates have centered on the concept
of beauty, during the I 980s that other form
of aesthetic judgment, the sublime, was often
invoked. See particularly [ean-Francois Lyotard,
ThePost-Modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1979; Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1986) and "The Sublime and the Avant-Garde,"
Artforum 22, no. 8 (April 1984): 36-43.
4. See Alex Alberro's article in this issue for a fairly comprehensive bibliography of the debate.

The Beautiful

Every object implies a certain kind of subject. Psychoanalysis is, of course, dedicated to uncovering this kind of relation. The fetish object, for example, implies
a subject that is split along the lines of acknowledgement and denial of castration. The glossy perfection of objects in fashion magazines, for another example,
implies a narcissistic subject who fears and defends against the ravages of the
body in pieces. Or again, the immaculate new kitchen as object implies a subject
trying to keep a lid on a repressed desire for glorious muck; the kitchen is what's
called a "reaction formation." You will notice that in each of these cases, the
object does not, so to speak, "match" the subject; rather, there is an inverted relationship, since the object is supposed to compensate somehow for a subjective
sense of deficiency.

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5. Immanuel Kant. Critique of Judgment, trans.

Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987).
245. For introductory accounts of this book. see
Michael Podro, "Kant and the Aesthetic Imagination," in Art and Thought. ed. D. Arnold and M.
Iversen (Oxford: Blackwells, 2003). 51-70. and
Eva Schaper. "Taste, Sublimity and Genius: The
Aesthetics of Nature and Art," in TheCambridge
Companion to Kant. ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992). For good fulllength studies see Henry E. Allison. Kant's Theory
of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic
Judgment (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 200 I), and Paul Guyer. Kant and the Claims
of Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1979).
6. Arthur Danto is critical of Kant's universalism
in "From Aesthetics to Art Criticism," Afterthe

Endof Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of

History (Princeton: Princeton University Press.
1997). 94. Thierry de Duve, on the other hand.
picks out the claim to universality as the most
important feature of the judgment. It is for him a
sign of hope that we can share our feelings with
others. See Kant afterDuchamp (Cambridge.
Mass.: MIT Press. 1996).
7. Arthur Schopenhauer, TheWorld as Will and
Representation vol. I, trans. E. F. J. Payne (New
York: Dover. 1969). 197.

And what about the beautiful? What kind of subject is implied by the object
of aesthetic judgment? One of the most important defining features of aesthetic
judgment, according to Kant in The Critique of Judgment, is its"disinterestedness."
There are different types of interest, for example, ethical, instrumental, and
appetitive. The first two of these answer a rational demand; the last stipulates
that the judgment cannot be determined by something that satisfies a desire
or lack. Psychoanalytic categories, then, would seem to be of little relevance
in this case. It seems as though the judgment is made by some part of the self
unlike what we normally think of as subjectivity.Yet, neither can the judgment
be objective, in the sense of rational or cognitive. This is because the object
of aesthetic judgment is one that eludes conceptual definition and cognitive
clarity. It is the focus of an opaque, if suggestive, sensory experience. And it is
this opacity that stimulates the free play of imagination and understanding. In
concert, these two faculties search for and find analogies, associations, formal
rhymes and rhythms. This activity is pleasurable in itself because it satisfies the
mind's demand for coherence, but without subsuming the sensuous particular
under any definite concept and so bringing the activity to an end. This is why
the judgment is said to be reflective rather than determinate; it relates to the
sensory and mental activity occasioned by the object. Both our ordering, rational
capacity and our receptivity to sensuous impressions are engaged. This activity
helps both to heal the divisions between our various faculties and, briefly, to
overcome the mind's estrangement from the world.' Is there anything to be
salvaged from this account of the beautiful? Or is it hopelessly conciliatory
and mired in a particular Western, male, bourgeois individuality, whose disinterested attitude is just the assumption of the position of the subject in general
entitled to legislate for all?"There are two features of this account that I want
to draw out and examine in the light of contemporary art practices and critical
discourses. One is the issue of disinterestedness; the other is the object's cognitive opacity.
Kant offered very few examples of the kind of experience he was describing, but both Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Arthur Schopenhauer connected the disinterested aesthetic attitude with Dutch art. Schopenhauer's stress
on the dominance of the will in our everyday lives meant that he particularly
admired Netherlandish depictions of the everyday, undistorted by appetite or
desire. Seventeenth-century Dutch still-life and genre painting, he argued, show
an objective, that is, disinterested, view of the most insignificant things. "The
aesthetic beholder does not contemplate this without emotion, for it graphically
describes to him the calm, tranquil, will-free frame of mind which was necessary for contemplating such insignificant things so objectively, considering them
so attentively, and repeating this attention with such thought." 7 What is being
described here is an art practice that tries to circumvent selfish desire, power,
mastery, possessiveness-the whole complex of relations that normally governs
our lives.The accomplishment of this is called disinterestedness.
A later, Symbolist critical discourse would reinvent this aesthetic attitude
by calling for a kind of poetry that avoided all personal obtrusion. In this case,
disinterestedness is invoked in favor of an extrapersonal and intrinsically poetic
domain of language. Stephane Mallarme, for example, wrote an appreciative
account of Edouard Manet, praising the way his hand became "an impersonal

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abstraction.... The artist's personal feeling, his particular tastes are, for the
time being, absorbed, ignored." Manet was determined to paint "entirely without himself." Searching for a way to accomplish this feat, Manet looked to the
Dutch and Flemish artists and to an artist who had absorbed their lessons, Diego
Velazquez." In the early 1970s, Michael Fried invoked Mallarme's essay to characterize the impersonal work of Morris Louis and his apparent" elocutionary
disappearance." Jackson Pollock, on the other hand, is seen as locked in a struggle between "the specificity of urgent personal feeling and the impersonal, and
in that sense abstract, demands of painting itself." 9 Mallarrne is also the key figure in Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" (1968): "In France, Mallarme
was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to
substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to
be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author." 10
Photography's"objective" vision of the world was also celebrated in these terms;
mechanization was understood as a way of cutting through the carapace of our
habitual, interest-laden perceptions. Salvador Dali, for instance, praised "the
anaesthetic stare of the extremely clear eye-the lashless eye of Zeiss." II And if
the mechanically reproduced image can be understood as "disinterested," so also
might the factory-made, mass-produced object-provided that it is denatured
so as to neutralize its status as a commodity intended to satisfy desire. The celebrated autonomy of the work of art, it turns out, implies the obliteration of
the poet or painter in his or her medium. It is fundamentally about the displacement of one's own agency so that something other can surface. The aim is to
cut through stereotype and sentiment so as to discover what Mallarrne called "a
strange new beauty." I2
8. Stephans Mallarme, "The Impressionists and
Edouard Manet" (1876), repro in Penny Florence,

Mal/arme, Manet, and Redan: Visual and Aural

Signs and the Generation of Meaning (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1986), 12.
9. Michael Fried, "Morris Louis" (1971), in Art
and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago and
London: Chicago University Press, 1998), /27.
10. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author,"
in Image/MusiclText, trans. Stephen Heath
(Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1977). The article was
first published in Englishin AspenMagazine S/6
(1966), n.p.
I I. Zeiss is the name of a German camera manufacturer, famous for the quality if its lenses.
Salvador Dali, "Photography: Pure Creation
of the Mind," in Salvador Dali: TheEarly Years
(London: South Bank Centre, 1994),216.
12. Mallarme, 17.
13. Dante, After the End of Art, 90.
14. This is essentially what Thierry de Duve
argues in Kant afterDuchamp. The question is no
longer, "Is it beautiful?" or even "Is it a painting?"
but rather "Is it art?" De Duve follows a number
of Anglo-American reflections on the aesthetic
in light of the readymade, Includingthe writings
of George Dickie, Arthur Danto, and Richard
Wollheim.
15. See "Specification for 'Readyrnades" in The
Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. M.
Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1975), 32.

Readymade

Characteristically, Duchamp pushed the logic of disinterestedness to such an

extreme that it bites its own tail. Arthur Danto has made this connection, noting
that "Duchamp's anti-aesthetic carries with it an implicit anti-subjectivity which
is to be found at the very heart of Kantian aesthetics." 13The readymade can be
seen as a limit case of the aesthetic-its near reductio adabsurdum-which forces us
to reflect on the relation of art to the commodity, of the aesthetic to the appetitive. Its effect, its legacy for subsequent art was to shift the artistic "discursive
field" away from questions about aesthetic experience and toward questions of
what constitutes a work of art. 14 The readymade is a limit case that throws into
sharp relief our deeply embedded expectations of a work of art. Need it involve
craft? Is the signature of the artist or the work's location in a gallery sufficient to
single out an object as art? Are aesthetic qualities necessary? Does a replica have
the same value as the original work? Or does this distinction collapse in the face
of the readymade? This reductive strategy puts pressure on our expectations of
the artist's activity by erasing every trace of personal taste or expressive gesture.
To accomplish this, certain processes are put in train to determine the form
or "choice" of the object. Duchamp's rendez-vous is exactly this-a prearranged
appointment (time, day, place, to be inscribed on the object that turns up for
the rendezvous). This strategy is compared by Duchamp to a "snapshot effect." 15
Although much theory and practice after Duchamp has been aggressively

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16. Ibid.. 138.

17. Pierre Cabanne, Dialogues with Marcel
Duchamp. trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Da
Capo Press. 1987).3 I.
18. David joselit argues that Duchamp and his
followers "found themselves readymade ...
caught in endless economy or reproduction."
I would add that they endeavored to break the
mold. See [oselit, Infinite Regress: Marcel Duchamp,
1910-1941 (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 1998).

197.
19. See. for instance. TheDuchamp Effect, ed.
Martha Buskirk and Mignon Nixon (Cambridge.
Mass.: MIT Press. 1996). and Thierry de Duve,

Resonances du Readymade: Duchamp entreavantgarde et tradition (Nlmes: Editions jacqueline

Charnbon, 1989). For an account of the variety
of Duchamp effects. see David Hopkins. After
Modern Art, 1945-2000 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press. 2000).
20. Mel Bochner. "Serial Art. System: Solipsism,"
ArtsMagazine 41. no. 8 (Summer 1967): 42.
See also Robert Morris. "Some Notes on the
Phenomenology of Painting: The Search for the
Motivated" (1970). in ContinuousProject Altered
Daily (Cambridge. Mass.: MIT Press. 1993).

71-94.
21. Roland Barthes, "That Old Thing Art ...,'.
in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on
Music, Art,and Representation (New York: Hill
and Wang. 1985).200. Barthes's insistence on
the asymmetry of the relation between the artist/
author and the reborn viewer/reader is not
shared by all commentators who see the artist's
reticence mirrored in an equally desubjectivized
response to the work.

anti-aesthetic, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Duchamp understood

his own work within the tradition of disinterested art. It is well known that he
distanced himself from the anti-art antics of Dada and Tristan Tzara, taking up an
aloof position outside the art/anti-art debate. In "The Creative Act," Duchamp
approvingly cited T. S. Eliot: "The more perfect the artist the more completely
separate in him will be the man who suffers and the man who creates." 16 When
discussing his early interest in mechanical drawing, he remarked, "It was a sort
ofloophole. You know, I've always felt the need to escape myself." 17 The visual
indifference of mechanical drawing and the readymade was, for him, a way of
escaping the weight of taste, defined as "a repetition of something already
accepted." The habitual, the tasteful, the accepted were the deadly readymades
that governed most art; Duchamp's readymades were governed by the zero
degree of aesthetics and aimed at a strange new beauty. 18
The legacy of the Duchampian "disinterested" attitude can be seen in
Minimalist, Pop, and Conceptual art. The so-called Duchamp effect on the art
of the later 1960s and 1970S is now clear.19 The elocutionary disappearance of
the artist is witnessed, for example, in Mel Bochner's description of the way
a logical system "excludes individual personality as much as possible," or in
Robert Morris's practice ofletting the materials determine form.?? In an article
about Pop called "That Old Thing Art ... ," Barthes reprised the argument of
"The Death of the Author," noting that "the Pop artist doesn't stand behind the
work, and he himself has no depth." He rightly concludes that what is presented
is "another conception of the human subject."21 While no direct line can be
drawn between Kant's disinterestedness and Duchamp's aesthetic of indifference,
my argument nonetheless indicates that the so-called anti-aesthetic tradition in
twentieth-century art is, in fact, a development of one of the defining features
of the aesthetic itself, one that became a strategy for short-circuiting the imposition of subjectivity.

Found Object
One can easily see how Kant's characterization of aesthetic judgment as disinterested could lead to the various desubjectivizing artistic practices I've mentioned.
But if one stresses another aspect of Kant's aesthetic, the initial perplexity and
prelogical play in relation to the object that eludes our full understanding, one
can also readily see how the aesthetic, modified through Freud, might survive
in some form in Surrealist art and writing. I want to draw out this continuity
in relation to Breton's conception of the found object. The found object shares
with the readymade a lack of obvious aesthetic quality and little intervention
on the part of the artist beyond putting the object in circulation, but in almost
every other respect it is dissimilar. The difference is attributable to Breton's positioning the found object in a different space-the space of the unconscious.
In "Surrealist Situation of the Object" (1935), Breton called on both poets and
painters to incorporate in their work the "precision of sensible forms." He
described a situation in which photography had taken over the mimetic function
of representation, so that Surrealist painting was forced to retreat to the domain
of inner perception. This would not mean, however, that painting would detach
itself from external reality. As Breton said, there is no such thing as "spontaneous

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22. Andre Breton, "Surrealist Situation of the

Object" (1935), in Manifestoes of Surrealism,
trans. R. Seaver and H. R. Lane (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1972), 272.
23. Steven Harris, "The Chain of Glass:
Rethinking Breton's Concept of Objective
Chance," Collopse 4 (May 1999): 60.
24. Andre Breton, Mad Love, trans. Mary Ann
Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
/987),25.
25. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts
of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans.
Alan Sheridan (London: Penguin Books, 1977).
Translation of Les quatre concepts fondamentaux
de la psychanalyse, livre XI (Editions du seuil,
1973). This is the published version of Lacan's
Seminar XI, delivered in 1964. Sigmund Freud,
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Standard
Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund
Freud, vol. 18, 3-66.
26. Breton, Mad Love, 13.
27. Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty(Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
28. Breton, Mad Love, 33.

generation" in mental reality. Rather, Surrealist images and objects are like the
"visual residues" from past experience that turn up in dreams." Freudian theory
enabled Breton to overcome the gap between internal and external domains,
because, as Steven Harris nicely puts it, it "mediated relations between external
nature, perception and the unconscious.T"
Like Kant, Breton saw art as a means of overcoming the breach between
mind and world. For Kant, it was the beautiful object's formal purposiveness that
gestured toward the idea of a "prearranged" harmonious relation of mind to its
objects. For the modern materialist Breton, however, the relation is established
by external reality's effects on the psyche: "Chance would be the form taken by
external reality as it traces a path (se fraie un chemin) in the human unconscious.T'"
The object found as if by chance is situated at the point of connection between
external nature, perception, and the unconscious, and thus has a peculiar, elusive
relation to vision. The space occupied by the found object is carved out by traumatic experience, defined precisely as an experience that has failed to achieve a
representation, but on which, nonetheless, one's whole existence depends. I will
argue that this object calls attention to itself by creating a hole in the fabric of
normal perception. This may sound as though I'm contrasting the found object
with the readymade in terms of a subjectivity/ antisubjectivity polarity, but the
matter is not so simple. The traumatic subject is not the personal self that was so
strenuously avoided in the tradition of disinterested art. Both that tradition and
Surrealism were interested in the displacement of the artist's agency.
What kind of subject is implied by the found object? I would suggest a
Lacanian one. Reading Breton's Mad Love (1937) and Jacques Lacan's 1964 seminar,
The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Analysis, in tandem one can see how they both
circle around Freud's Beyond thePleasure Principle and, also, how deeply influenced
Lacan was by Breton's notion of the objet trouve or trouvaille (found object)." Breton
described the trouvaille as a solution found not by logical means, and one that
differs completely from what is anticipated. "In any case, what is delightful here
is the dissimilarity itself which exists between the object wished for and the
object found."26 In his book Compulsive Beauty, Hal Foster has analyzed in some
detail the passages in Mad Love about the two key trouvailles-a wooden spoon and
a metal mask; he demonstrates clearly that they do not represent simple wish
fulfillments, but are laced with desire and death. He suggests that Breton's conception of the found object anticipates Lacan's objet petit a-the lost object which
sets desire in motion and which, paradoxically, represents both a hole in the
integrity of our world and the thing that comes to hide the hole. 27
I think, however, that Lacan's elusive object is actually modeled on Breton's
found object. The example of the marvelous slipper-spoon is most telling. Breton
wanted Alberto Giacometti to make him a literal, material instantiation of the
perplexing phrase Cinderella-ashtray (Cendrillon-cendrier), but it was not forthcoming.
On a visit to a Paris flea market with the sculptor, Breton lit on a curious wooden
spoon with a little boot carved under its handle and carried it off. Only when he
got the object home did it transform itself into the object of his desire: "It was
clearly changing right under my eyes. From the side, at a certain height, the little
wood spoon coming out of its handle, took on, with the help of the curvature
of the handle, the aspect of a heel and the whole object presented the silhouette
of a slipper on tiptoe like those of dancers.T"

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Man Ray."From a little

shoe that was part of it
... ;' 1934. Black-and-white
photograph published in
Andre Breton, Mad Love.
2004 Man RayTrustl
ADAGP, Paris, and DACS,
London.

29. Ibid., 36.

30. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, 184.
31. Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses, Seminar Book
III, 1955-56, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York
and London: Routledge, 1993), 179.
32. Malcolm Bowie, Lacon (London: Fontana,
1991), 168.
33. Roland Barthes, Comera Lucida: Reffections on
Photography (1980), trans. Richard Howard (New
York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 87. See my "What Is
a Photograph?" in Art History 17. no. 3 (September 1994): 450--63.

Like the anamorphic skull in Hans Holbein's painting The Ambassadors, which
resolves into a skull "from the side, at a certain height," the opaque, incomprehensible spoon is suddenly transformed into the lustrous lost object par excellence,
Cinderella's glass slipper. "It is just what, in our folklore, takes on the meaning of
the lost object. "29 If the reflection in the mirror is the prototype of all images of the
ego, then this contradictory, ungraspable, fleeting object is the prototype
for images of the castrated, barred,
split, in short, anamorphic subject.
This subject, called punningly by
Lacan lesujet troue (the subject full
of holes), uses an objet trouve (a found
object) to figure both the hole and
the bit that's missing. 3 The slippery
spoon of love has its counterpart, the
mask of death, found by Giacometti
on the same occasion and which,
according to Breton, enabled him to
finish his sculpture L'Objet invisible.
If, as I argue, Lacan formulated his idea of the object of desire with Breton's
trouvaille in mind, then he must also have borrowed the Surrealist notion of the
encounter for his conception ofJa rencontre monquee (missed or failed encounter).
In effect, Lacan recast Freud's conception of trauma in terms of the Surrealist
encounter. The found object is encountered and the effect is traumatic. The
contrast between the Duchampian rendezvous and the Bretonian encounter
should now be clear.While the readymade is essentially indifferent, multiple,
and mass-produced, the found object is essentially Singular or irreplaceable,
and both lost and found.
Throughout his career, Lacan insisted that there was something about the
subject not captured in the articulations of language or in a series of imaginary
captivations. The allusions in his early writings to personality and to the style
of the subject attest to this, as does the following remark from Seminar III, The
Psychoses: "There is, in effect, something radically unassimilable to the signifier.
It's quite Simply the subject's singular existence." 31 The mark of the subject's singularity is objet petit a.Yet, since objet petit a cannot become an object of consciousness and is unspecularizable, it is not susceptible to the criticism that it revives
a nostalgia for lost immediacy or presence. Treading carefully, Malcolm Bowie
remarks that, with the introduction of objet petit a, Lacan allowed "the ghost of
referentiality to regain admission to his scheme." 32
A ghost of referentialiy is exactly what Barthes invoked in his Camera Lucida,
where he stressed the greater importance for photography of chemistry rather
than the camera obscura: it is light-sensitive paper that gives the photograph its
essential nature as a "that-has-been." Barthes emphasized the photograph's intimate connection with the object, attesting to the reality of the thing-but a
reality in a past state, an ectoplasm, a reality one can no longer touch. As I have
argued elsewhere, Barthes formulated his idea of the subject's relation to photography with one hand in the pages of Lacan's Four Fundamental Concepts.v He argued,
for instance, that the defining characteristic of photography is its attachment to

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"the absolute Particular, the sovereign Contingency, matte and somehow stupid,
the This ... in short, what Lacan calls ruche, the Occasion, the Encounter, the
Real, in its indefatigable expression."> ruche is experienced by the subject as a
painful intrusion, as a trauma-an encounter with a real beyond the pleasure
principle. In the first part of Camera Lucida, the real is located in a detail, a punctum,
also called by him "petite tache" (little mark or stain)
-a reference to Lacan's blind spot in the orthodox
perceptual field also called the stain and defined as
"that which always escapes from the grasp of that
form of vision that is satisfied with itselfin imagining itself as consciousness.l'Y For Barthes, photography, like the found object, has a privileged relation to this blind spot, this hole, this traumatic real.
If this is so, then photography is a fascinatingly
ambivalent medium: not only readymade/simulacral, but also traumaticlreal.

Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly. Post-Portum

Document, Introduction,
1973. Detail. Perspex units,
white card, wool vests, pencil, and ink. Four units, ea.
8 x lOin. (20 x 25.5 em).
Collection of Eileen and
Peter Norton. Courtesy of
the artist.

34. lbid., 4.

35. Ibid., 75.

36. Mary Kelly, "Excavating Post-Partum
Document," interview with Juli Carson, in Mary
Kelly: Rereading Post-Partum Document (Vienna:
Generali Foundation, 1998), 186.

37. Minotaure 3/4 (December 1933): 68

38. See my "Visualizingthe Unconscious: Mary
Kelly's Installations," in MaryKelly (London:
Phaidon, 1997), 32--85.

I now want to focus my discussions of the found

object, photography, and aesthetics beyond the
pleasure principle on the work of two contemporary artists. One artist whose work has always been
a touchstone for my thinking is Mary Kelly. In a
recent interview, Kelly spoke about how she regarded
her installation Post-Partum Document as polemically
related to the work of British Conceptual artists,
whose interrogation of the object was not followed
up by an interrogation of the subject. 36 The Introduction to Document, 1973, takes the form of tiny baby
vests crossed, indeed, crossed out, by the lines of
Lacan's diagram of intersubjectivity. Although the
vests are readymade and arranged serially, their
psychic value and relation to loss is obvious, making them more akin to found
objects. The panels of Corpus, Part I of Interim, have the same significance. In
Interim, middle age is conceived as a moment ofloss in relation to one's sense of
identity as a woman. The posed articles of clothing refer to the neuropathologist
Jean Martin Charcot's famous photographs of hysterics, of great importance in
Surrealist circles, but formally they resemble the photograph in Breton's Nadja
of a bronze paperweight in the form of a woman's glove. This isolated article of
clothing served as a model of the image panels for Corpus. However, the Surrealist
images that relate formally most closely to the Corpus panels are Brassai's strange
close- up photographs of Sculptures involontaires. 37 These involuntary sculptures were
photographed on glass and subjected to a raking light so that they seem to hover
just above the ground, casting a shadow. Kelly produced a similar effect by using
semitransparent laminated photo positives applied to Perspex panels so as to
emphasize these objects' peculiar relation to visibility-"
Kelly gives us a clue about what she found valuable in these Surrealist

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Brassa"i. Sculpture involontoire,

billet d'outobus rou/e, 1932.
Black-and-white photograph.
Estate Brassa...., R.M.N.

Anonymous. Photograph of
bronze glove belonging to a
woman, 1928. Published with
caption "Gant de femme
aussi . " in Andre Breton,
Nodjo, 65.

opposite:
Mary Kelly. Interim, Port I:
Corpus, 1984-85. Laminated
photo positive, silkscreen, and
acrylic on Plexiglas.Thirty
panels, ea. 35 x 48 in. (90 x
122.5 em), Courtesy of
Postmasters Gallery, New York.
Courtesy of the artist.

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precedents when she contrasts the function of perspective construction with

another kind of picture found in "the realm of lost objects," a realm where
"vanishing points are determined, not by geometry, but by what is real for the
subject, points linked, not to a surface, but to a place-the unconscious-and
not by means of light, but by the laws of primary process." 39 These filmy items
of clothing are adrift in the realm of lost objects, cut off from symbolically articulated reality.This is consistent with Breton's call for artists to use real objects in
their work. While he encouraged poets and painters to incorporate the "precision of sensible forms," he also required that these objects be detached from the
domain of perception-consciousness, making them like the "visual residues" that
turn up in dreams.t? Carefully choosing her materials and formal devices, Kelly
positions her objects in an ambiguous space between external nature, perception, and the unconscious.

Gabriel Orozco

39. Mary Kelly, "Desiring Images/Imaging Desire,"

in Imaging Desire (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press,
1996), 122.
40. Breton, "Surrealist Situation of the Object,"
272.
41 . Gabriel Orozco, Photogravity (Philadelphia:
Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1999).
42. David Joselit describes Orozco's work as
involvingan encounter with the readymade, blurring the distinction I wish to preserve between
rendezvous and encounter. "Gabriel Orozco,"
Artforum 39, no. I (September 2000): 173.
43. Orozco, S4.
44. Ibid., 8.
45. Ibid., II.
46. Interview with Carl Andre. See Lucy Lippard,
SixYears: The Dematerialization of Art trom 1966
to 1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997),40. See also Alex Potts, The Sculptural
Imagination: Figurative, Modernist, Minimalist (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 312ff.
47. Orozco, 36.

There is a wonderful catalogue of an exhibition of Gabriel Orozco's work held

at the Philadelphia Museum ofArt in 1999.4' Reproduced in the volume, called
Photogravity, are fragments of pages of the artist's notebooks. All very Green Box, you
may say, and Duchamp is undoubtedly an important figure for Orozco.f But
some of his work and notes point in another direction. A fragmentary note
reads: "Photography as a hole."43 Elsewhere in the notes, one can find jottings
that help to explicate this puzzling phrase. It would seem to have some relation
to his idea of the "expectant (or waiting) object."44This object is the inverse of
sculpture, which traditionally has its center of gravity in its base. What would
happen, Orozco asks, if sculpture were opened up and we moved inside it? Then
the relation would be inverted; the spectator would become the object of sight,
the vanishing point.t- This idea is reminiscent of Lacan's inverted perspective
diagram in The Four Fundamental Concepts ofPsycho-Analysis. But Orozco had to accomplish this inversion in space, in material form. On the same page is a sketch for
just such a projected nonsculpture. A slice of clay is removed from the base of a
traditionally conceived sculpture. The sculpture is thrown away and the slice of
clay spread out on the ground and flipped over so we can see the imprint of this
opened-out, obliterated vanishing point. We are not far from Carl Andre's floor
pieces and his gnomic remark" A thing is a hole in a thing it is not," which
points toward an idea of sculpture as a rupture in the continuum of space." For
the most part, Orozco's notes aren't dated, but we can be pretty sure this is a first
stab at what was to become Yielding Stone, 1992, a ball of plasticine that has been
rolled through the street, picking up marks and debris. Black Kites (1997) also
seems to play on a collapse of Renaissance perspective, whose very emblem is
the checkerboard-tiled pavement, now anamorphically stretched and distorted
around a death's head. If my allusion to Lacan in the context of Orozco's work
seems farfetched, there is another page in the notebook where Orozco has jotted
down a quotation from Slavoj Zizek's Looking AwryY Zizek is largely responsible
for the mediation to a wider audience of Lacan's later work, where he developed
the idea of the real as a register of the psychic reality set in relation to the imaginary and the symbolic. The Zizek citation follows remarks on Kazimir Malevich's
Black Square (1915).

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The "reality" (white background surface, the "liberated nothingness:' the

open space in which nothingness can appear) obtains its consistency only
by means of the "black hole" in its center, (the Lacanian das Ding, the Thing
that gives body to the substance of enjoyment) i.e., by the exclusion of the
Real, by the change of the status of the Real into that of a central lack.48

Gabriel Orozco. Yielding

Stone. 1992. Plasticine and
dust. 19 in. diam. (48.5 em),
132.2 Ibs (60 kg). Collection
Walker Art Center. Minneapolis. Courtesy of the
artist and Marian Goodman
Gallery. NewYork.

48. Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to

jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge.
Mass.. and London: Verso. 1991), 19.

If Kelly shows us the object's proximity to that central lack, then Orozco
wants to show us the unrepresentable threshold itself: the next-to-nothing, the
ripple in water, "the wake of an action," as he puts it. In short, "photography as a
hole." See, for example, Orozco's photograph of a found Zen drawing done with
rain water for ink and bicycle wheels for a brush, Extension ofReflection, 1992. His
Breath onPiano, 1993, shows a smoky patch of condensation on the cool black surface of the piano. The Waiting Chairs, 1998, are expectant objects, parexcellence. These
photographs present objects on the threshold of visibility or invoke an absence or
past moment in time. In this way, Orozco heightens photography's that-has-been

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Gabriel Orozco. Extension of

Reflection, 1992. C-print. 16 x
20 in. (40.6 x 50.8 em), Edition
of 5. Courtesy of the artist
and Marian Goodman Gallery,
New York.

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Gabriel Orozco. Breath on

Piano, 1993. C-print. 16 x 20 in.
(40.6 x 50.8 ern), Edition of 5.
Courtesy of the artist and
Marian Goodman Gallery,
NewYork.

character, but also generalizes it to include the whole texture of our experience of
the world, punctuated as it is with holes leading down to the unconscious.
We saw that the modernist tradition of disinterested art displaced subjectivity in favor of the medium; the effect of Duchamp's (postmodern?) intervention
was to expand the idea of medium to include the whole institution of art. The
desubjectivizing strategy of the readymade, with its systematic work of negation
and testing of the limits of what counts as art, has sustained art practice for most
of the last century and continues to do so.Yet the dominance of the Duchamp
effect may have blinded us to the legacy of the found object, which is less visible
and less concerned with reflecting on and undermining the conventions and
institutions of art. The examples of Mary Kelly and Gabriel Orozco show that
there is a wealth of art that breaks the self-critical circle and opens itself to wider
issues of subjectivity and SOciality, loss and memory, love and death. As Zizek
so pithily put it, with regard to cultural theory: "The celebrated postmodern
'displacement' of subjectivity rather exhibits an unreadiness to come to terms
with the truly traumatic core of the modern subject."49 My proposal for an
aesthetic beyond the pleasure principle is aimed at approaching that core and
so sets about complicating the tradition of Kantian disinterestedness and the
displacement or effacement of subjectivity implied by the reiteration of the
readymade. However, it retains the value Kant placed on the engagement with
an opaque, elusive object that sets into play the senses, imagination, and
understanding.
Margaret Iversen is Professor of Art History. University of Essex, England. She is the author of A/ois Riegl:
Art History and Theory and MaryKelly (with Douglas Crimp and Homi Bhabha). She also edited (With Dana
Arnold) Art and Thought.

49. Slavoj Zizek, "Burning the Bridges." in The

Zizek Reader. ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond
Wright (Oxford: Blackwells, 1999). ix.

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