In order to be «found» the ready-made has to undergo, really and completely, Duchamp’s process of double negation. It must become a readymade. Paz observes that the loss of significance of the object (ready-made) and its fall in the vacuum (readymade) does not last long: «everything that man has handled has the fatal tendency to secrete meaning. Hardly have they been installed in their new hierarchy». Hence, the need to «rectify» the ready-made: injecting it with irony to preserve anonymity and neutrality. Art must maintain a state of permanent revolution to keep resisting habit and institutionalisation to become art.
Let us call the change in the nature of the object (Paz’s second negation) an «invisible transformation»: art is not beauty, fascination, or whatever without being, first, resistance to an imprisonment of life into moral and political models of sensation. Anonymity and neutrality play a great role to keep this resistance. Besides, without «rectifications», Duchamp’s idea of readymade is no longer able to ensure anonymity and neutrality. Art is always in danger. It is its very nature. Duchamp knew that. So did Artaud.
The anonymous character affirmed by means of the second negation promoted by Duchamp’s readymade helps to take us outside the already too common sense debate about the artist’s signature. An artist turns something into art by signing it. We already know that. There seems to be no doubt about that. As Paz admits himself, the object is anonymous; the man who chose it is not. It is the gesture of signing. The audience asks, allegedly looking for the artist’s skills, «Who said this or that?», «Who made it?». It is the old argument of authority – ad hominem.
Is it not already a second gesture?
Yes, because the gesture that counts is not the gesture of signing, but the gesture of «creating» the readymade. The key point comes with the excellent comparison between two types of signature, made by Paz:
«Roger Caillois points out that certain Chinese artists selected stones because they found them fascinating and turned them into works of art by the simple act of engraving or painting their names on them. (...) [The Chinese artist] inscribes his name on a piece of creation and his signature is an act of recognition; Duchamp selects a manufactured object; he inscribes his name as an act of negation and his gesture is a challenge».
There is, in the first case, the signature of the person who «knows», who «has taste» to select. He is deemed as entitled to choose the object, a readymade expert. But there is a signature where taste plays no role at all. It merely plays an institutional role. In an article written thirty years ago («The Crux of minimalism», 1987), the art critic Hal Foster has put the emphasis on that aspect to sustain an argument about an essential break with late-modernist art, preparing «postmodernist art» to come. Fortunately, he goes beyond that. He also recognises a way in which what he calls transgressive avant-garde (Duchampian Dada, Russian constructivism etc.) can be read as a «return» to modernism, all in spite of what seems his prejudices about modernism, arbitrarily associated with the formalist endeavours of an art critic like Clement Greenberg.
Agreeing with Foster, one can say that the institutional nature of art has been largely exposed after Duchamp. But anonymity means much more than that. Anonymity goes with neutrality. An anonymous object in the museum primarily means that our geniuses of creation, together with their objects, are less important than what lies beyond them. And what lies beyond them? Their relationship with the world, nature, cosmos, life... Anonymity then serves to neutralize the already too codified and demarcated (Deleuze and Guattari would say, too «territorialized») spaces.
Thus, if the presence of Duchamp’s readymades in an art museum may seem bad nonsense, it is precisely because its function is negative beyond the merely institutional. Of course, its presence is important and legitimate inasmuch as it challenges our perception and the museum, curators and all institutions associated. It is Paz’s first negation: intellectual cleanliness (criticism of taste) and attack on the notion of work (criticism of artistry). However, anonymity and neutrality challenges practical-existential boundaries much more than just taste and institutional boundaries. In fact, the readymades deserve to be either at the exit or at the entrance door of the museums, as reminders of an outside related to the objects themselves, to our relation with them.
Let us return to Paz’ words about Duchamp’s gesture as a gesture of selection, not as a mere signature gesture: he selects a manufactured object; he inscribes his name as an act of negation, and his gesture is a challenge.
Institutions have been challenged. But there seems to be much more than this at stake in Duchamp’s selective gesture. The challenge comes to the following: art finds its own outside, not simply nature or even our wonderful manufactured world of useful and consumption objects. Art finds its limit. At the same time, for the same reason, everyday life finds its limit. The readymade has excavated a space in between the art world and everyday life. The readymade is a two-edged weapon, as Paz asserts, «if it is transformed into a work of art it spoils the gesture by desecrating it; if it preserves its neutrality, it converts the gesture into a work». In my own words: put in the museum in the same place of other art objects, the readymade loses its power; kept neutral it becomes art. Duchamp, master of paradoxes.
It is at this point that Paz seems to make a mistake, perhaps because of his singular way of conceiving art. Indeed. It is not easy to juggle with knifes. According to him, seen as a dialectical game or as a means of purgation, the readymade would not really be an artistic act after all, but the invention of an art of interior liberation. Buddhism.
Why so? Would not it be precisely the contrary? As an object that escapes categorizations, not artistic or everyday object any longer, would not the readymade be able to put the boundaries inside/outside, interior/exterior into question? Would not it be an artistic act precisely – and a fortiori – because of that? Not an interior liberation, but rather art in the sense of liberation from both interior and exterior, from subjects and objects, from artists and museums.
Artistic acts ultimately consist of challenging boundaries and limits. Duchamp’s readymade can thus appear as virtual in the sense of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, or even as transitional in the sense of Donald Winnicott’s psychoanalysis. The readymade has no value as an actual everyday object, but it has no value either as a possible world created through artistic symbolism. Its real value lies elsewhere, in a third domain: not actual nor a mere possibility – Deleuze. It traces a new map: the third area does not belong either to artistic territory or to everyday life as such, although both worlds contribute to it. It is an object able to keep inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related – Winnicott.
Virtuality and transitionality: from Duchamp to Bispo do Rosario
The bewilderment of most of art lovers in our days against the undeniable fact that almost anything can be and has been called art during the last fifty years is well known. An entire book (The Contingent object of contemporary art, Martha Buskirk, 2003) was written out of this interesting and strange situation. One of the artists responsible for the situation – probably together with Andy Warhol – is, of course, Duchamp. The damages caused by his invention of readymades still remain. But these are certainly not damages in the simplistic common sense argument, asserting that the notion of art is now spoiled since the artistic domain has become the realm of whatever, but rather in a political-institutional sense, properly stressed by a French contemporary philosopher (The Crisis of contemporary art, Yves Michaud, 1997).
It is the death of a utopia, which Michaud labels as the Kantian utopia, an aesthetic utopia of an agreement of individual consciences. The real damage is the will to stick to it or to pretend to stick to it for the sake of finding justifications for our choices in art on an institutional level:
«Whatever are the attempts to counter the disillusion, the utopia is indeed dead (…). Its death corresponds to the end of a certain representation of art and of a certain belief in art. It is already an ancient death. When one thinks of it just a little, it is even strange that old beliefs have as much influence; (...) that some dare to do as if Duchamp’s Fountain could generate the aesthetic agreement of consciences! Who believes in it for a minute and who do they mock?»
Yet, the high institutional-political price to pay for Duchamp’s revolution seems largely worth being paid. It is a price for the benefit of difference, both in art and in our everyday experience of objects, ethical and political, albeit in another level, micro-political since it deals with our connections between life and human social creations. In the art world an important change has certainly occurred. The artist does not claim craft or workmanship as the key for his/her art. Accordingly, a different attitude is requested from the spectator following the change in the artist’s task.
As Buskirk notes throughout her book, Duchamp’s readymades established a new model of artistic authorship (in fact a non-model), a «model» where formal unity is not to play a role anymore. In this manner, without the ghost of formal unity, art works may find their new artistic space in terms of creation of events, an affirmation of difference both in the sense that any and every object is potentially art and in the sense of a re-intensification of our life experience with our environment and its objects.
The spectator has been brought back to the art scene in a political shifting, perhaps a last blow on the «auratic» age of art, but in a sense different from Walter Benjamin («The Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction», 1936). In any case, the scenario is forever new: at least in the domain of the so-called visual arts where hands and retina are no longer accepted as capable of subordinating artistic experience. The consequence is an opening for new manifestations and different participations: «As the traditional notion of the artist’s hand has been deflected into a profusion of different kinds of manifestations, the works thus produced invite the viewer, whether literally or imaginatively, to occupy the positions vacated by the artist».
As I have stated in the beginning of this paper, the readymade is an event. Duchamp’s actual readymades only remain as part of history – that is the reason why it is bad nonsense to include them in the midst of art works aspiring to a place in the art world. The readymade may remain there, of course, but in a specific room for out of place objects. What really matters is the idea of readymade. Let us state it as clear as possible: the readymades were not a phase in Duchamp’s artistic career. Even less are they a type of art that he invented. They were events causing an invisible transformation by means of the double negation discussed above. They remain as an invitation for new experiments in the same direction, i.e., for gestures or creative acts capable of opening a breach through which art and everyday life find their limits.
After Duchamp, there is no more dialectic of art world and everyday life whereby our common sense can despise the arts for their strangeness and the artist can despise everyday life for being banal or deglamourized. A new space has emerged, a space that one could name virtual in a free use of a concept created by Gilles Deleuze.
Deleuze’s virtual gives room to an alternative to the classical philosophical framework, which conceives existence as reality stemming from possibility. As the French philosopher shows in his difficult Difference and repetition, there remains a quasi-opposition between possible and real that ruins our understanding of difference; and what we understand by «new» is reduced to nothing but an actuality relative to a previous actuality within a continuous line of successive events. It suffices to think of history of art as a sequel of «improvements» and «legacies».
Deleuzean virtuality is never separate from actuality, it never opposes actuality as in our common understanding of the word: as possible or simulated. The virtual is fully real, not lacking anything (nothing like, «only possibilities»). It develops not as in a process of becoming real; but rather, in a process of becoming actual – actual in terms of stable; a state of things possessing qualities. This is the first fundamental difference between possible and virtual. Coming to existence is a continuous and discontinuous process. It is not to be conceived as a sudden leap, although it is always overflowing. There must be a clear cut difference between existent and non-existent. The latter should not be put as reducible to something less real, a mere possibility or nothing at all. It is not (non-existent) while the existent is something, but as an actuality inhabited by virtuality. So is the readymade: it is an objet trouvé, actual, but not «found» as a real everyday life object or as a possible artistic (dream) object as it was the case of the Surrealist objects. It is an actual object made indifferent as such, impossible to find, or «found» solely as virtual.
Second, but not least, still according to Deleuze, if the so-called possible still has always to become real, it remains a simple image of reality, copied from reality, making the new unthinkable as new in its own single form. The possible is just a degraded copy of the so-called real. The virtual, in turn, is reality that remains invisible, neutral. By performing an invisible transformation of a ready-made into a readymade Duchamp points to a virtual where art world and everyday life are unable to recognise themselves, and something new in its own form can emerge. As Deleuze asserts, it is in the process of actualization that one can find a true process of genesis (or creation) since the limits are no longer within the narrow constraints of our concepts. A process of genesis worthy of the name only occurs with the creation of divergent lines corresponding to multiple virtual situations.
This second feature of the virtual is essential to understand what I see as some ethical- political consequences of the readymade. They appear in the works of the Brazilian artist «brut» («outsider») Arthur Bispo do Rosario.
Bispo do Rosario was a Brazilian artist who actually started his works after his internment in an asylum in Rio de Janeiro (Colônia Juliano Moreira), by the end of the 1930’s. Diagnosed as «schizophrenic-paranoid», he lived there for about 50 years. During his long stay in the mental institution, Bispo do Rosario could fashion hundreds of works from different types of materials collected («found») around the asylum and in its courtyard. These works were intended to mark the passing of God on earth reincarnated in him as Jesus Christ. Whenever asked about his choices in terms of craft, Bispo do Rosário said he was told to do that way by voices from beyond. His «mission» would be a reconstruction and/or a «re-presentation» of the world to God in the Judgement Day.
Bispo do Rosario’s best known work is precisely the Manto da Apresentação («Presentation Cape»), which he intended to wear on the Day of Judgement. But most of his themes include household objects and objects related to navigation (Bispo do Rosário was in the Navy during his youth).
One of the most difficult obstacles for the study of Bispo do Rosario’s art lies in the terrible mist that our common sense often lets hover around people (artists, philosophers etc.) in cases of so-called madness. What I mean by that is simple to a certain extent. Our stupidity is prone to dominate all analyses whenever we find something shocking or scandalous about what is to be understood. Mental illness is a clear case of something shocking. Bispo do Rosario experienced hallucinations, wandered the streets of Rio, headed to a church and a monastery; finally he announced he was Jesus, in charge of judging the living and the dead. In short, he was (or went) crazy. After such a very short biography, the next miserable step is to try to explain his art in terms of his illness as if people’s deeds were a projection of their state of mind.
There are, in fact, two tasks to avoid when one decides to approach the difficult relation between art and madness – tasks to bear in mind at any attempt to make sense of the relations between people’s creations and their everyday life. The first is to refuse as positively as possible a comprehension of the works of any artist in terms of his/her mental state or common behaviour. Next, it is also important to avoid separating them, as if they belonged to two different worlds.
Even here, once again, Duchamp’s readymade operation may prove instructive. There are no previous boundaries between art and life; one can never know exactly where the two spheres start and finish in relation to each other, the ready-made and the readymade, for instance. It is always necessary to keep up with the tension, to remain suspended, neutralized, refraining from drawing hasty conclusions.
A second difficulty to approach Bispo do Rosario’s art revolves around the very theme of this paper, namely, the question of the new relation that the readymade kind of work is supposedly able to establish between recognisable everyday objects (ready-mades) and our reality after they become art (readymades). After all, it is clear that the general transformation brought about with Bispo do Rosario’s readymade is quite different from Duchamp’s invisible transformation of indifference. It would be foolish to sustain that Bispo do Rosario’s readymades follow or confirm the Duchampian notion as a new style in the domain of the arts. The «brut» («outsider») aspect of his works is essential to prevent this line of interpretation about what a readymade is or can be. History of art is not allowed here. First, because it is impossible to claim that Duchamp could have had an influence on Bispo do Rosario. He did not know Duchamp. Second, because he never belonged to the art world in general. He could not be less concerned about styles or schools.
Bispo do Rosario’s readymades and the ones created by Duchamp operate in completely different manners. The question is, why then name Bispo do Rosario’s objects readymades? Because both Duchamp and Bispo do Rosario operate the same kind of transformation with their respective different objects. It always consists – in both artists – of «finding» objects of everyday life without ascribing any secondary meaning to them. Duchamp’s readymades and Bispo do Rosario’s «brut readymades» (let us call them this way from now on) are everyday life objects that have been «lost» and cannot be «found», or that can only be «found» as «lost», like Anna, Antonioni’s character in The Adventure.
Everything goes like in Deleuze’s approximation of his virtual object with two famous objects of psychoanalysis: Melanie Klein’s partial object and Jacques Lacan’s «a» object («objet petit a»). Because of the «alienated condition» of Bispo do Rosario it may also be useful to translate the situation in psychoanalytic terms as I did with the Surrealist object above.
According to Deleuze, partiality in Klein is far from meaning, «lacking totality» because the «subtracted part» (the mother’s breast in the case of a child, for instance) is «ripped out» in order to acquire a new nature. A partial object is partial in itself, for itself, creating a new reality: «good breast, bad breast». This subsequent splitting already indicates an achievement of autonomy in the face of a presupposed natural order. As for Lacan, things get a bit more complicated because his celebrated «a» object stands for the object of desire as unattainable, imaginary, in a Surrealist fashion. It is Buñuel’s Conchita once again, «to be found as unattainable». However, if the virtual object is detached from the series of real objects – following Lacan’s logic – it is not in the sense of an expression of desire as lack. It is detached from the series as in Bispo do Rosario’s art, ultimately because they need a new reincorporation, a practical-existential insertion in the world.
To be honest, the question of being or not being attained cannot be a problem because there is no meaning beneath the objects. A readymade is flat. It was the case since Duchamp. It is not the case with Breton. Besides, the real is not impossible for desire, as Lacan used to say; it is to be produced in a practical-existential dimension. So is it for the arts as well.
Yet, Deleuze finds Lacan’s theory of a object useful for it contains the evident secret of the readymade: it always lacks its identity, bicycle wheel with a stool instead of bicycle, bottle-rack without bottles... What identity do they have then if not a virtual one?
Despite their differences, both the objects of Duchamp and Bispo do Rosario can be considered readymades since they can only be «found» as «lost», as missing its own place – everyday life. It is like in Edgar Allan Poe’s Purloined Letter. That is what really matters: Poe’s letter or the ready-made of everyday life as out of place, removed by the characters in the famous short story, by Duchamp to enter the museum, or by Bispo do Rosario to be re-presented in the Judgement Day to God. But following an important argument put forward by Jacques Derrida («The Purveyor of Truth», 1975) after Lacan, it is not a problem of lack of meaning. It may be much simpler. The meaning is not lacking. It is lack. It is not a case of playing with words without being, rather, a confirmation of the second aspect of Deleuze’s virtual. A space has been excavated in between «lost» and «found», so that the new can emerge, a re-actualization of the art world and everyday life. The meaning is the lack of definitive meanings without investing what is supposed to mean.
The ready-made objects of everyday life have been taken out from their actual world to become virtual objects, but they are not objects of desire without being, primarily, practical objects of everyday life. In the case of Duchamp, they are not objects of desire at all; hence their indifference. The case remains for Bispo do Rosario.
In any case, there are at least two very important and decisive differences between Duchamp’s readymades and Bispo do Rosario’s. Firstly, Duchamp makes the ready-mades get «lost» in the museum, creating the out of place situation while Bispo do Rosario simply ascertains that the objects are «lost» in this world because the entire earth is going to be razed in fire. Consequently – and this is the second fundamental difference –, Bispo do Rosario’s ready-made objects are not to be «found» exactly as «lost», merely out of place as it was the case in Duchamp’s art. They undergo a process of genesis with the creation of divergent lines inasmuch as they must be assembled and prepared.
Bispo do Rosario’s readymades are indeed «found» because they are slightly remade, although not in the sense of Andy Warhol and other pop artists. It is a remaking in the sense of a gathering and a classification because the objects are going to be presented in the Judgment Day. As said above, that would be his mission, and it is repeated at least twice, in an interview included in a publication, and again in a very important film about the artist (Prisoner of the passage, Hugo Denizart, 1982):
«INTERVIEWER – Can you please tell me about that mission of yours?
BISPO DO ROSARIO – My mission is to succeed the next day to represent the existence of the earth that is there.
(...)
DENIZART – Are these representations of miniatures?
BISPO DO ROSARIO – It is the material existing on earth for the use of man.
DENIZART – Is it a representation of everything on earth?
BISPO DO ROSARIO – Yes, they are the work of what exists.»
It seems that the negation is no longer double in the case of Bispo do Rosario. The transformation ceases to be invisible too. Bispo says he was told to «represent» the existence of things on earth, which implies that the gesture cannot be negative anymore. Everyday objects are not collected on the basis of their indifference as in the case of Duchamp. But it is important to remain attentive here. They are not collected out of their beauty or of any special value either. They remain everyday objects. In short, the gesture is not negative. After all, Bispo do Rosario has a mission. It is the gesture of a mission. Nevertheless, his objects are themselves negative in the same sense of the anonymity and neutrality stressed by Octavio Paz.
However, even anonymity has a slightly different sense in Bispo do Rosario’s art, as the recent paper quoted above, published by two psychoanalysts, has helped to make clear («Bispo do Rosario and the representation of the materials on earth», Corpas & Vieira, 2012). As the authors conclude, Bispo do Rosario’s work comes out of the delirious dynamic of his mind, but this is what allows him to establish a link with the cultural environment. It is what gives him that plus of social bond partially broken after his psychotic outbreak.
Bispo do Rosario’s brut readymades keep Duchamp’s neutral feature because they do not belong to any art world or to everyday life anymore. Thus, on the one hand, they exist in a liminal zone, neither art nor life as self-contained domains. On the other hand, they are also anonymous, completing a negation, but only to a certain extent because, after all, there is a work of assembling and preparing – the task of «re-presentation». Anonymity is therefore relative; it is valid for the objects, but still, these have to be presented again (re-presented), which requires someone suitable for the task. This suitable position does not reinstate a negative gesture though. Bispo do Rosario’s readymades constitute a single negation. Taste or institutions do not have any importance whatsoever. There is no negation on this level.
It is precisely the second merit of Corpas and Vieira’s article. As the authors succeed to demonstrate, the widespread idea about Bispo do Rosario’s work being simply reconstruction of the world misses the very core of his enterprise, which is to show, introduce or present, again, God’s creation. His readymades must therefore be thought within a process of genesis or radical re-creation. They are a world coming into being in a concrete manner, not as a mere metaphor. The work of any artist entails the creation of a world, which allows us to label everyday life atmospheres accordingly, Kafkaesque traps in the domain of our institutions, Fellinean types that emulate reality (like the famous Paparazzo)... And so forth. With Bispo do Rosario this process becomes as clear as ever. It is the second aspect of Deleuze’s virtual mentioned above: the limits of art and life dissolve, their lines converge to attain divergence, i.e., household objects or the presentation cape are and are not just household objects and a cape to wear. As a different complement to Duchamp, the readymades are now to be used, but with a new purpose. They are created or taken from everyday life to be re-presented, re-invested, re-intensified in a better life after the Judgement Day.
Bispo do Rosario’s readymades excavate the same nowhere zone of Duchamp’s readymades, but already connected with the outside as potential space. In short, the two outsides, proper to art and life, are immediately connected with a practical-existential dimension, a new life (for Bispo do Rosario, an afterlife), a life new in its own form, as in Deleuze’s understanding of what newness is supposed to be.
We have finally reached a new paradox amongst many. I still remember the cold reactions of people in one of the first exhibits of Bispo do Rosario’s works in Rio de Janeiro’s MAM (Museum of Modern Art): «this cannot be art, after all these are just objects with no intention to be considered art». A twofold accusation: not only the classical one, usually raised against Duchamp or Warhol, of «mere objects», but the intellectual and historicist one, which demands a place and an intention in order to justify what art can be. Once again, it is clear that the resolution formula «an ordinary object elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist» cannot apply to readymades. It is rather a lowering in Manoel de Barros’s fashion, capable to challenge aestheticism, a lowering in the name of a practical-existential «elevation» of tiny things in life. It is life elevated as a potential space for a new world as one expects the Judgment Day. No doubt, «judgment day» is bound to be metaphorical here. It stands for all turning points a life can bear.
Nonetheless, Corpas and Vieira’s article on Bispo do Rosario loses focus as their analysis progresses. It is often the problem with psychoanalysis. After stressing the advantages, or even the necessity, to take Bispo do Rosario’s words about «representing the materials on earth» literally; after having shown that representation in his case does not bear any mimetic meaning... the authors seem to stumble. First by arguing that the term representation indicates, «Not addressed to God alone, but to society», when the most important is the idea of presentation. Secondly, which is much more serious and spoils their enterprise, by interpreting Bispo do Rosario’s art in terms of a compromise, a last resort exit in the face of madness.
It is evident that psychoanalysis has a lot to say when it comes to Bispo do Rosario’s art. After all, we are dealing with an extreme case of unconscious activity of creation. But why such a reactive claim that «for being incapable to establish a stable delirium by the sole means of imaginary re-creation of his self, Bispo do Rosario had to appeal to the production of objects…»?
Such a hypothesis and interpretation is unacceptable. It even goes against the whole intention of the article, which claims on the same page not to be interested in treating delirium as pathology. But the temptation is always too strong every time psychoanalysis stumbles and assumes the strange role of a scientific attempt to regulate our inner conflicts.
Fortunately, it does not have to be this way. We find in the works of another psychoanalyst (Donald Winnicott) a way out from this psychoanalytic true fever of drives, discharges, defences, adjustments etc. With Winnicott, the background map of our connections matters first and above all. All objects are there. All impulses deploy on this basis of a plurality of objects. It is on this ground that one should set feet. Consequently, Winnicott has been deemed to belong to a new trend in psychoanalysis: the object relations fashion.
Of course, it goes much beyond my ambitions to provide an accurate and minimal account of such a difficult matter. It suffices for me to clarify one thing before closing this text: the object relations terminology still sounds vague, besides not capable to reveal the extent of Winnicott’s originality (I would prefer to talk about environmental-transitional-developmental trend). At any rate, it is important to let the contrast hereby established as clear as possible with the aid of one of the first and most consistent attempts to make sense of the so-called object relations trend.
Thus, a 1983 book by Greenberg and Mitchell (Object relations in psychoanalytic theory) blames Winnicott for a systematic misreading of Freud and concludes about the former: «As his work developed (...) it became apparent that Winnicott was proposing not an extension, but an alternative to Freud’s approach. He is offering a framework for understanding psychopathology which, firmly rooted in the relational model, is at odds with classical formulations based on drive and defence».
The contrast makes perfectly understandable Corpas and Vieira’s derogatory interpretation of Bispo do Rosario’s «representation of the materials on earth» as a last resort in face of his disability to recreate oneself beyond an imaginary structure. After all, the authors inscribe their efforts in Lacan’s approach to psychosis, which ultimately gravitates around the same drive and defence orbit; a world where a fundamental Narcissism reigns and it is our relations to others that need explanation, not our development within an environment.
It does not matter. With Winnicott, Bispo do Rosario’s objects of lunacy can finally become, not a last resort or a dramatic appeal, but an affirmation of difference in the second sense sustained in the beginning of my paper: a sense of a re-intensification of our life experience in an environment, with its objects and their common use. They can appear as virtual objects turned into transitional ones.
«I have introduced the terms ‘transitional object’ and ‘transitional phenomena’ for designation of the intermediate area of experience (...) It is generally acknowledged that a statement of human nature is inadequate when given in terms of interpersonal relationships, even when the imaginative elaboration of function, the whole of fantasy both conscious and unconscious, including the repressed unconscious, is allowed for. There is another way of describing persons that comes out of the researches of the past two decades, that suggests that of every individual who has reached to the stage of being a unit (...), it can be said that there is an inner reality to that individual, an inner world which can be rich or poor and can be at peace or in a state of war.
(…)
My claim is that if there is need for this double statement, there is need for a triple one; there is the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute. It is an area which is not challenged, because no claim is made on its behalf except that it shall exist as a resting place for the individual engaged in the perpetual human task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related.»
A transitional object belongs to a third intermediate area of experience. It is virtuality establishing connections. One may ask: but how exactly Deleuze’s virtual objects become transitional in the Winnicottian sense? My sketchy hypothesis is that this new aspect of the readymades is clinical, i.e., it is revealed as one gets closer to artists and viewers in their lives. It shows off, for instance, in the case of Bispo Rosario’s art, as an essential aspect allowing him to change and develop his self-perception regardless of any inner pseudo-necessity to contain his delirious imaginary production. On the contrary, Bispo do Rosario is not unable to re-create himself by means of anything and so remakes objects; he can only re-create a self out of those very objects, in a process of genesis that includes the world and his own self in the world together and separate at the same time.
The intermediate area of experience is neither intra-psychic nor merely shared reality; it is a liminal zone or border, a potential space in which infants or patients like Bispo do Rosario can create what is to be found. What an infant «creates» is his/her transitional objects, Teddy bear or blanket like in Charles Schulz’s character Linus. Following the same logic, a readymade is an object found to be created, a transitional object as well, but carrying out a different correlative transition in which the practical-existential dimension of things around us is rescued from mere habit and/or conservative formalism.
With Bispo do Rosario, readymades become what they are: third parties included, art and non-art, life as it is and after-life as it is not yet (and we do not know if it will ever be). They operate a transition in the development of art and life, not only for the schizophrenic Bispo do Rosario, but for a fundamental schizoid dynamic that haunts us all. They reveal this third part inherent to all relationships, which points to the horizon, to cosmos, to the environment according to Winnicott. They are objects pulled from their context, turned into a formless matter that can only gain form and make sense in a practical-existential dimension. For Bispo do Rosario it is the practical-existential dimension of a sacred task. It remains for each of us to know how these objects can be put together.
As Winnicott explains, the third area of experience ultimately subsists as a resting place for the individual engaged in the task of keeping inner and outer reality separate yet inter-related. That is the challenge. Duchamp’s readymades kept separate and inter-related the world of aesthetics (institutions and trained taste) and everyday life. Bispo do Rosario’s readymades kept separate and inter-related, on the one hand, his mental state and the hostile environment that threatens all schizophrenics today and ever; and on the other, this world and its re-presentation for the Judgement Day – call it art or not.
Works Cited and Consulted:
Artaud, Antonin. Le théâtre et son double (1938). Paris: Gallimard Poche, 1985.
---, Collected works. Volume Four. Translated by Victor Corti. London: Paris & Boyars, 1974.
Atkins, Robert. Art Speak: A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzworks, 1945 to the present. New York: Abbeville Press Publishers, 1990.
Benjamin, Walter. «The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction» (1936), in Illuminations. Edited with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1977.
Barros, Manoel de. Tratado geral das grandezas do ínfimo. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2001.
Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1992). Translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 1996. https://bildfilosofi.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/therulesofart.pdf
Breton, André & Éluard, Paul. Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme (1938). Paris: José Corti, 1991.
---. «Équation de l’objet trouvé» (1937). http://www.arcane-17.com/medias/files/e-quation-de-l-objet-trouve-andre-breton-.pdf
Buskirk, Martha. The Contingent object of Contemporary Art. Cambridge, Mass. and London: The MIT Press, 2003.
Corpas, F. S. & Vieira, M. A. «Bispo do Rosario e a representação dos materiais existentes na Terra». Tempo Psicanalítico, v. 44, n. 2, Rio de Janeiro, 2012. http://pepsic.bvsalud.org/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0101-48382012000200010
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinéma 2: L’Image-temps. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1986.
---. Différence et répétition. Paris: P.U.F, 1968.
---. Logique du sens. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1969.
--- & Guattari, Félix. Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie II. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1980.
Derrida, Jacques. «The Purveyor of Truth» (1975). http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/Burt%20Glossator/purveyor_of_truth.pdf
Domenech Oneto, Paulo. «Geopoética de Manoel de Barros em dois movimentos e um adagietto» in Souza, Elton. Poesia pode ser que seja fazer outro mundo – uma homenagem a Manoel de Barros. Rio de Janeiro: Sete Letras, book in press, 2017.
Duchamp, Marcel. Du Champ du signe. Écrits (1958). Réuni et présenté par M. Sanouillet, nouvelle édition revue et augmentée avec la collaboration de E. Peterson, Paris: Flammarion, 1994.
---. In Cabanne, Pierre. Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp. London: Thames and Hudson, 1971.
---. In Seitz, William Chapin & Shattuck, Roger. The Art of Assemblage: A Symposium, October 19, 1961. New York, N.Y.: Museum of Modern Art, 1967.
---. In Sweeney, James Johnson (ed.). The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin (New York), vol. 13, no. 4/5, 1946.
Foster, Hal. «The Crux of minimalism». https://pt.scribd.com/doc/109323090/Hal-Foster-The-Crux-Minimalism
Greenberg, Jay & Mitchell, Stephen. Object relations in psychoanalytic theory. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983.
Michaud, Yves, La Crise de l'Art contemporain. Utopie, démocratie et comédie. Paris: P.U.F., 1997.
Passeron, René. Encyclopédie du Surréalisme. Paris: Éditions Aimery Somogy, 1975.
Paz, Octavio. «The Ready-made» (1970) in Masbeck, Joseph (ed.). Marcel Duchamp in perspective. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975.
Winnicott, D.W. «Transition Objects and Transitional Phenomena» in Through Paediatrics to Psycho-analysis (1958). London: Hogarth Press: 1975.
