CERJ LALONDE
SELECTED ARTIST'S WRITING
ADDITIONAL
ART AND ARTIST: PROBLEM OF IDENTITY
51st Annual Convention
INTERNATIONAL COUNCIL OF PSYCHOLOGISTS
Montréal, august 15 - 19, 1993
BY
CERJ LALONDE
Good morning and thanks to be here.
I would like first of all ask you, as a foreword, to excuse my English, witch is not so good. I mean certainly not as good as I would like.
But now, since we have to be concise on time, and go right away on the subject matter of this round table, I have to recognize that we have a very serious contract today in this way that it asks us to elaborate on a subject which is, fundamentally, for two reasons, indefinable. I say for a double reason because since we're concerned by the problem of identity of the artist, we're faced with two problems: this one of identity and that one of the artist. And I am surrounded here by some erudite persons that I would please asked you to don’t count to much on me to clarify these problems. Mater of fact, I think it will be easier for me to bring some more confusion to it. That's the way I am.
- I just said "that's the way I am". I am. Does’ it mean that this is my identity? I don’t think so. My identity is more complex. Like yours. But let us say it right away: my identity is confused. And it's not obvious. Some people can say: I am this; or some other: I am that. Some time I think I know what I am not. But even there, I'm not sure. I don’t' know. I really don’t' know who I am. And that's my problem of identity - as a person. And that brings me to be able at least to say this on the problem of identity : I think it depends on the general constitution and the individuals characteristics of the person concerned. And then, I mean as much the physiological aspect and the bodily tensions of the individual, as much of the dynamic constitution of his drive organization, just as his Oedipus structure and as is global socio-historic and cultural situation and heritage. We see that this is extremely complex and relative and can develop an infinite variety of identity or of feeling of identity.
Now, talking about the problem of the identity of the artist is playing with a myth. Freud himself, who's theories have been seriously reviewed but kept as part of some fundamental base to human being understanding, said, in his preface of the Dostoyevsky’s novel The brothers Karamazov, that the problem of the artist was unanalysable. Some artist, like Barnett Newman said that "the first man was an artist". My famous colleague here present, Guido Molinari, already said, in a statement on the artist almost twenty years ago, and after many reserves, that the artist was, first of all, the human being himself. And again two days ago Marilyn Ferguson just said in Montréal in an other International Forum, on arts and culture, that "Each being is an artist".
Well, these kind of statement bring me to confide to you a reflection I have already said few times, to wit that it is not the object witch defines art, but rather the kind or the type of relation established or developed between subject and object. What I mean by that, is what you already know, witch is that someone can do painting, or sculpture, or music, etc, without necessarily making art; but what I also mean is that I think art can happen in many other ways... cooking for example, or mathematics, philosophy, psychology, administration, may be even politics. Here again, in my opinion, things happen in the kind of relation developed between the subject and his object of intervention, witch he is inventing, from witch he is producing, with witch he is working, practicing, making, creating, acting, living.
Could we say that it is an element of the alienation of the person required by the division of work prevalent in our societies witch structurally produce an ideology witch names and specifies the object of art. I don’t know, but that makes me think of one work of Barbara Kruger, this other American artist who puts sentences on her photographs, and one of these says "You thrive on mistaken identity".
And to stop this sort of jumble of scattered and eclectic thoughts on the artist’s identity, I will confide to you another observation witch helps me sometime to root in human experience what we call the art feeling. Dictionaries, etymologically base the word art as knowing (the art to do something; knowing how to do it). And knowing, in French, is savoir. And savoir, etymologically, comes from sapere, saveur, goûter. Taste something. And exploring in this way, we can imagine that art could be knowing in that way you feel it inside you. And why not, with some adventurous psychoanalytical vision, entrench this feeling of knowing with these first and pristine states of the fulfillment of the newborn, and art as the way to repeat it, or to keep it alive on a socio-cultural level. But that's a question you probably know much more than me to explore.
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