Subversion of the Artist: Psychoanalysis and Painting

(August 2025)

A common convention in academic discourse is to challenge the artist (as painter) to explain the why of their practice — a demand for a justification for why one should make paintings at all. Here, the voice of an institutional power loops a productive yet anachronistic ritual, the periodic resurrection of painting’s corpse. The inquisition of the artist’s act parallels a particular saga within philosophy’s history, where a persistent ‘why is there anything at all’? is posed across millennia. In response to this dilemma, past thinkers have excavated the why to raise a more fundamental question of what it means to be. In this sense, the institutional why — framed as an exercise in articulation — overreaches, and seizes upon what is primordial for the artist. This overextension implicates ethics, as the artist is compelled to account for themselves, their motives, and their practice. In the historically shifting forms of the artist — as a servant of the divine, as a mirror of power, as part of the avant-garde, or decentered as an artist-as-brand (Warhol, Koons, Hirst, Murakami) — what broadly constitutes the artist becomes outsourced or siloed. However, when the unconscious from psychoanalysis is pulled into view, we’re presented with a wholly different picture of the artist — where the artist’s subjectivity comes to the fore.

‘Painting for its own sake’ connotes a practice that justifies itself, where both its means and ends feed into each other, and where the boundaries between the act and its cause dissolve. But prior to the disappearance of these boundaries, the artist was once a student with a particular set of motives and contexts, with only an inkling of know-how. In the burgeoning of the student’s familiarity with the medium, a need for knowledge appears. And insofar that we find need, we find a lack — as such, painting as an act is tied to learning as its partial cause. When the student finds their voice and presumes their artistry, they may see the cause of their practice as the mediation of autobiographical, biological, political, or social realms. Or, they may see the act of painting as self-sufficient and autonomous — perhaps indicating a suspicion that underneath the demand for justification is a reduction to mere conditions. Without diminishing the role of the artist (as subject), the terms of the act and its cause can be transformed through a psychoanalytic formulation. Here, the self-enclosed notion of painting as an act turns into fantasy, while the reductive materialist explanation dissolves the artist’s subjectivity — taken together, psychoanalysis locates the artist as a split subject.

Through this reframing, the act of painting can be understood apart from consciousness and material conditions — through the drive and jouissance. While these concepts are polyvalent in meaning, we can distill two important aspects that relate to the partial motive of the painting act, which is: the drive as the enjoyment of repetition itself and the drive as that which produces an excess of enjoyment (jouissance) on the level of the unconscious. In a practice, the completion of a painting may result in a satisfaction with the finished object, but this does not necessarily result in a complete and final satisfaction that exhausts the need to paint (which would dissolve the practice). The movement found in working on one painting to another, illustrates the drive’s enjoyment through repetition. Put another way, the question of when a painting is ‘finished’ directly connects to the ‘aimless’ character of the drive. Since its enjoyment is found in repetition and not finding its object (total satisfaction), a work that isn’t a ‘paint by numbers’ exercise exemplifies the always-incomplete state of the painting — a ‘finished painting’ is contingent on the circumstances of the artist. The repetition of the drive also produces jouissance, a transgressive enjoyment tied to an excess of pleasure, an intensity from being ‘too-much’. In practice, this appears as the accumulating fatigue of the body when a session of painting tips into longer studio hours or when frustration intensifies failure into self-flagellation. These are masochistic pleasures normatively veiled as virtues, an inversion that appears as the idiom of a practice serious enough to be viewed as monastic or ascetic. A commitment to a practice involves following our conscience or the psychoanalytic equivalent, as the superego’s imposition on the ego-ideal — from its place, a commandment is issued: to follow our passions (desire), to continue creating (drive), and to enjoy the suffering (jouissance) it comes with. What follows is that the engine of a practice is not fulfillment, but lack, repetition, and excess.

In this way, painting becomes a site of ethics in its connection with a narrative — producing an opposition between an affirmative, positive conception of the artist as presumed by the institutional why and the negative metaphysics tied to the psychoanalytic unconscious of the artist. In a Lacanian key, the artist is a tragic character with no stable self, caught in language yet unable to secure stability through it. The historic and contemporary elaboration of what an artist is predicates an identity bundled by intrinsic traits and external structures (signifiers) — the interaction of these elements (signification) is what produces the conception of the artist. Psychoanalysis posits that this image is fractured, where its appearance is found not in consciousness, but in the gaps between signifiers in the register of the unconscious. Consequently, this entails that the artist is a ghost, a spectre caught between the play of language. When institutional forces seek to grasp the substance of what an artist is, the psychoanalytic reply involves a productive fiction haunted by a tragic ethics of desire.

Making Sense of Our Time

(August 2025)

‘Everything happens for a reason’. ‘Trust in the universe’. Expressions like these circulate widely — from Chinese fortune cookies to Horoscope blurbs to Broadway productions (as in Beetlejuice’s No Reason). They belong to a pattern of cultural representations that seek to stabilize our sense of past, present, and future by framing life through the lens of purpose. And while these platitudes might be overused, their subtexts suggest an anxiety that emerges when confronted with ambiguity. Despite their usage with irony, partial belief, or social circumstance, the critique of such clichés is hardly unfounded. However, the impulse to derive meaning from narratives about one’s own life or locate causality in personally significant events isn’t new. It’s equally symptomatic in cultural, religious, historical, and philosophical traditions — finding their form in destiny, predestination, revisionism, or determinism. While we might be soothed by the authority of modern science or the promise of transcendence, they come at the cost of shaping what we are permitted to desire or imagine.

Our views about how to situate ourselves across time expose a broader symptom — a desire for an underlying ideal or rationale that regulates our perception of events, relationships, or the self. This framework functions as an organizing principle that stitches together past experiences and imparts a sense of order and predictability. The past becomes less enigmatic because we’ve displaced part of its mystery by translating it into terms we can grasp. And in saying so, meaning becomes interrogated by sorting a prior experience within the network of our present understanding. In psychological terms, this is the way in which our beliefs about the world converge, and if that integration fails, instability appears as cognitive dissonance. Repression, denial, and distortion are the ego’s strategies to defend against the threat of randomness — and by extension, death itself. Our own frame of reference for the past also informs the way we look into the future, although in a different form. When we envision it, two vantage points appear: the future as viewed from the perspective of the present, and the present as viewed from a future self. Underneath this dual-conception of the future lies a retroactive logic that structures predictions — a necessity for self-preservation, both on the level of biology through adaptation and on the level of the psyche through fantasy (in the psychoanalytic sense). And while the function of imagination extends beyond mere survival, retrospection and forecasting holds a premium value within human history, even if the evolutionary forces that produced them aim toward preservation over objectivity. Over time, varying selections and transformations result in an evolved need for coherence — where stories morph into folk theories, which then codify into norms. This paves the way for social hegemony to materialize and parasitize on our vulnerability, extorting it through its own logic.

The adaptive strategies once primed around survival become retooled through socio-political structures — producing incentives and deterrents to pressurize conformity to existing paradigms. We find their expressions in the familial as parenting style, the cultural as productivity, the in-group as politics, or religion as denomination. The double-bind: belonging in exchange for a piece of our desire, or alienation in the pursuit of personal meaning. The connotation of virtue and vice finds inversions in collective societies — where prioritizing parental wishes over one’s own appears as duty or avoidance of a particular vocation upholds honour. These configurations offer a frame for which to make sense of our experiences — translating phenomena into legible units of meaning. The uptake results in our ability to plot the coordinates of our experience and compare them to pre-established notions of ‘the good life’ — offering us direction, but at the price of disputing our desires.

Beneath the weight of social demands and the pull of our personal wishes, lies a primal anxiety — the fear that without an external reference, our lives might amount to nothing. In an ancient history, death was our familiar guest. But we’ve hushed its presence — breaking it into smaller, manageable sublimations. If we wish to move past any guarantees, we can take a leap into the place where desire resides. Where instead of an eternal guarantor, we extend our sights forward and imagine our future self — looking back as witness to our present, steadying us against the void.

Dreams and Their Contents

(July 2025)

From the drift of sleep to the moment of waking, we are roused from rest — by the ringing of an alarm, the rustlings of a partner, or the gentle lift from a well-tuned rhythm. We might not be so lucky each day. The visceral experience of a nightmare can jolt us into a fevered consciousness and leave us disoriented. As children, we may have enlisted an adult to interpret a dream’s meaning or lack thereof — to diffuse our anxiety. We might have been comforted by the idea that ‘it wasn’t real’, that ‘it never occurred’, or that it was because we ‘watched too much’ of something unpleasant. In much of contemporary life, we may be encouraged to ‘see right through’ the fiction of dreams. Since they occur in a different world, they are often ascribed little or no value. ‘Reality’ is what matters. Why spend time thinking about something that never actually happened?

In many historical traditions, even disturbing or frightening dreams were treated as exegetic material — where messages, prophecies, visions, revelations, insights, and truths could be gleaned. Today, the practice of interpreting one’s own dreams is seen to belong to the realms of pseudoscience, where its utility is solely for narrativizing and installing personal meaning. Approaches like defusion and decentering — drawn from Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy and mindfulness-based practices — echo a similar logic to the posture modelled in adulthood: regarding dreams as mere occurrences in sleep, without identifying with the contents or ruminating further on ‘what it means’. If a dream is experienced through a ‘perspective’ — whether through their own or someone/something/somewhere else — is the dream not their own? While self-identification with dream content may be counter-productive to the pragmatist, in what sense can we write it off as mental cinema? How can what occurs in our dreams have nothing to do with us? Whether the dreamer experiences depersonalization or an out-of-body state, the dream’s re-telling will always be located in the person who dreamt it. To insist on one’s ownership of their dream is not to claim that its contents hold hidden meanings or allegories. It is to affirm an ethic of remembering, because it is our relationship to dreams that ‘say something’ about us. The dream speaks, but it is our relation to its form that’s worth considering.

Unlike waking life, dreams have the power to induce us into unusually heightened subjective states. We might feel unsatiated, volatile, uninhibited, or removed, positioning us to act and perceive in ways we wouldn’t otherwise. Research indicates that nightmares occur more frequently in children, revealing that our methods for coping underwent great rehearsal. It is this particular repetition that informs how we might respond to the aftermath as adults. In order to manage the intensity of bad dreams or nightmares, we use a host of strategies — including but not limited to: disavowal (‘it was just a dream’), integration (meaning-making), repression (pushing the dream or its emotional charge out of consciousness), sublimation (a re-framing of overwhelming affect), or rationalization (explaining a dream’s content in logical terms). The fact that dreams lack coherence, causality, or stability suggests that these mechanisms function as necessary defences, operating as safeguards upon waking. But the knife twists when we realize that these protections are a response to an inheritance of a fundamental anxiety about dreams. This ties in with early childhood experience, where anxiety often functions like a currency — opting to trade it for a less threatening affect (displacement). The very fact that defences appear suggests that anxiety is a brush against death. In essence, defensive formations are safeguards against anxiety — they’re measures to create distance from the unbearability of confronting our own deaths. Our closeness with the objects of dreamt experience expose us to other threatening possibilities: as fulfillment of unconscious wishes in a disguised form (Freud), as the staging of our desire (Lacan), or our impotence to resolve failure (Cathy Caruth). The dream is issued from the place of our own subjectivity, but without our authorship. What Lacan calls extimate — the intimate, yet alien part of ourselves — names the structure of our relation to dreams.

In conscious life, our most reliable defence against death follows a logic of containment — a sense of safety secured by the frame of the thinking self. But within this lucidity, we quietly accept its offer: giving away our anxiety for the illusion of mastery, a promise made by the ego. Now, we are left to steer the vehicle alone — as subjects responsible for a route we neither chose nor fully understand.

Half-truths: When Our Tools Break

(July 2025)

With the online circulation of art critique ‘hot-takes’, it only takes a glance to observe the polarization of opinions — condemning ‘woke’ art, calling out ‘money-laundering’, and a host of other laments from the ‘de-skilling’ of art education (‘my kid could do that’) to the perceived bankruptcy of works that fetch several figures in the secondary market. This cacophony of frustrations touches on a nostalgic longing for a ‘return to beauty’ uncontaminated by artspeak or market forces arbitrating aesthetic value. Yet beneath the harshness lies a deeper divide about how the meaning of art is negotiated. Within the art world itself, we find an orientation between two poles — one that prioritizes formal properties, and the other that foregrounds contexts, privileging institutional narratives and political imperatives. And while most figures and institutions of the art world communicate with both sides in mind, it is difficult to ignore how art discourse in practice privileges one over the other. When one particular ‘face’ dominates, what kinds of meaning slip from view?

This dynamic shapes the way we tend to think or examine any given art object. These two orientations of analysis pertain to what we might call their internal and external features. In reference to what is internal, we’re speaking to qualities like appearance or materiality — aspects that directly connect to the object’s particular composition or inhabitation of space. In contrast, the external mode of thinking is a focus on context, where an object’s subject matter or political positioning, for instance, is of primary concern. Across Western thought, we see a recurring oscillation between these two perspectives, as evidenced through Plato’s transcendent forms, Kant’s immanent purposiveness, or Clement Greenberg’s medium-specificity (later coined as formalism by critics). Unsurprisingly, history has shown that we have a particular penchant for binaries. Art critic Hal Foster confronts the dualism in his Return of the Real (1996) by calling attention to contemporary art’s reintroduction of traumatic and bodily concerns, as evoking the Lacanian Real, where the Real is ‘what resists symbolization absolutely’. Here Foster aims to move beyond the binary, yet remains entangled in the opposition, since attempts to embody what can’t be symbolized inevitably returns to representations — a deadlock that may leave audiences untethered.

A functionalist account of historically contingent modes offers counterpoint to our relation with art objects. Heidegger’s concepts of ‘ready-to-hand’ (Zuhandenheit) and ‘present-at-hand’ (Vorhandenheit) in his seminal Being and Time, are apt here. He elaborates with an analogy of a ‘hammer’ — that in its use, recedes into its means to drive nails (ready-to-hand) rather than appearing as a hammer in itself. However, if it were to break, then the hammer would reveal its thingness (present-at-hand) — where its function as a tool surfaces through its broken state and inability to perform its ‘intended’ task. In the reading of Avant-Garde works — Abstract Expressionism (Pollock, Krasner, Rothko) or Modernism (Cézanne, Manet, van Gogh) — the formalist frame of the picture structures our enjoyment seamlessly. Its function as a tool for examining features like colour or texture slips beyond our awareness. And while we might be able to appreciate the scintillating character of ‘colour fields’ or point to the flickering of imprimatura grounds, administering the same application of thought to a Kehinde Wiley portrait (without reference to European historical painting and the ‘Black’ experience) or Anselm Kiefer (without connection to Nazism and the Holocaust) would expose its limits. Here, the formalist framework reveals its thingness — as a theoretical construct with visible seams. This realization suggests that the tension between internal and external interpretations might dissolve if we thought of these perspectives simply as tools, rather than as mediums channelling any final truth about art objects.

Ironically, this might say more about human nature than the nature of art objects. Whether it’s our attitude about institutions mobilizing art for activistic ends, or devotion to essentialist ideas instituting ‘real art’, let us be under no illusions — these are interpretive frameworks, not pathways for art’s ‘true nature’. When our ‘tools’ break, it is us, not the objects of art, that are suspect for examination.

Mythologizing

(July 2025)

The confronting ‘What do you want to be?’, posed to us in early life, echoes across our lifespan. What begins as a question about our vocational aspirations soon becomes distorted, taking on an existential weight. It plants an unconscious seed — an anxiety of what one ought to be as an adult. As children, we respond to this ‘innocent’ prompt by choosing what’s most salient, which is often what becomes enacted or fantasized in play or modelled by those we aspire to be like. The question about how we might imagine our future position inserts a quiet teleology about our ‘purpose’ and finds itself popularized in culture as: What’s the meaning of life? And while it’s taken on an ironic status amongst Millennials and Gen Z’s, the question still finds its form, albeit repressed and sublimated through career aspirations, romantic relationships, and other narratives of fulfillment. This pressure to ‘be something’ seeps deep enough into ordinary ways of thinking that it risks opening simple creative gestures to evaluation and judgement.

Through schooling or the conditions of the home, we may be encouraged to pick up a pencil or a brush and told to express ourselves. These acts quickly entangle with notions of ‘creativity’ and are evaluated by praise, disapproval, or indifference. Over time, their appraisals lead us to associate these acts of mark-making with the artist, a cultural representation that quietly appropriates exploration and curiosity on the page. With enough internalization, an inner critic emerges and demands we do better or give up entirely. Many of us fall into this trap of over-determining what might otherwise remain an ordinary act of exploration and oppressing ourselves by comparison with the ‘genius’ of the artist. From birth, this ‘person’ is endowed with a gift of knowing, fluency, and self-transparency. Insofar as we think this way, we alienate ourselves beyond the margins of this conception of the ‘genius’ artist. We respond to self-defined notions of failure and success through negotiation and re-negotiation of such terms — inciting a masochistic circling around our identity. This evocation of ‘who is’ and ‘who is not’, elevates the artist status through imagined scarcity and predestination.

Creation ex nihilo — ‘creating out of nothing’ — assumes the originality of the artist as an independent being. It imagines them creating spontaneously without aid, reference, or dependence on predecessors or collaborators — instead, operating alone and citing divine or spiritual intervention, or enshrining their ego as the wellspring of ideas. In the digital world, this narcissistic trope of originality manifests more broadly in ‘celebrity culture’, IYKYK (if you know, you know) influencers, and narratives that grandstand tech-billionaire founders (Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos). Through various forms of media, we can call to mind the hyperboles of the ‘tortured’ artist — the apparent necessity of mild to severe mental illness for creating ‘works of art’ or depictions of substance abuse and alcoholism amongst artist-types framed as ready-states for inspiration — further perpetuates this motivic relationship between deteriorated mental well-being and artistry. From advertising to film, popular media is saturated with these stereotypes, which raises broader concerns — how do we want to think of ourselves, and by extension, others, in a culture that reveres mythologies that confine and overdetermine identities?

The Subject of the Artist

(July 2025)

’Thinking through paint’ is the kind of innocuous expression one might hear in an artist talk or interview. It gestures towards what can’t easily be named. And among artists, this idea appears self-evident — painting itself is the ‘thinking’. In the studio, the artist’s engagement with their medium(s) unfolds as a complex, layered process, where embodiment precedes language, where ‘thinking’ occurs without words, and where the terms of one’s practice folds back into the act of creation itself. It’s then no surprise that we reach for these studio-born idioms to capture a part of this private experience.

Julia Kristeva’s semiotic knots this more tightly — that the ‘thinking’ of this kind can situate itself in the body as a felt drive or an undercurrent that expresses itself through language. By contrast, the ‘thought’ in everyday thinking is directed towards particular objects. The artist’s ‘thought’ is located in a kind of flow state, where the subjective experience of “I” recedes. But if the unconscious is that which appears in slips, jokes, or dreams, and the “I” is what appears in self-consciousness, what can we say about who’s doing the ‘thinking’ at this level? Perhaps we already sense that language struggles to translate these experiences into ordinary terms. So, maybe, you just had to be there.

Audiences often make genuine efforts to engage with a given work through feeling, reflection, and analysis. But Jean Baudrillard’s notion of the simulacrum challenges what it means to come away with a sense of having got it. What feels like comprehension may well be a response to a simulation. Formal considerations like line or shape in a painting can be examined, or an artist’s experiences empathized with, but if our ideas about Art exceed illustration or reproduction, then what does it mean to ‘know’ a work at all? Perhaps the remedy to this impasse is to resist mastery altogether and let the work remain opaque, without demanding resolution.

However, in an attention economy that privileges speed over slow-burning meditations, it’s evident that this productive logic seeps into our after-work lives, turning leisure into labour. It’s no wonder, that some aspect of our relationship to Art too, seeks comparable immediacy — a 2001 study conducted at the MET indicates that the average museum-goer spends around 27 seconds for a given work (consider how much shorter that time might be today). Consumer conveniences like same-day shipping (Amazon) or AI-personalized algorithms (Tiktok, Instagram) quietly displace our patience and tolerance — traits to be kept in check if we want to stay vigilant against the creeping expectation for faster returns on our attention. In practice, the anxieties and apathies found in the art-viewing experience seem to relate in part to their legibility and relatability. Even the opacity, and at times, outright obfuscation of gallery wall texts, further amplifies our desire for clarity. Yet the artist who refuses explanation, leaves the viewer without much scaffolding, risking the same charges of mysticism they sought to resist.

Speaking about one’s own work is like creating a scene in a film: show, don’t tell. The audience doesn’t need to be spoon-fed, but inspired to imagine and interpret in the spaces our speech leaves open. To quote Edward Hopper, ‘If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.’