Transference, Countertransference, Event, in Black & White
by Daniel Barbiero
Poetry or Painting? is the title of one of the six previously published books collected in Kernels, a compilation of monoprint works created by poet Tim Gaze over the course of several years. It’s a title that can stand for the entire collection: are these asemic poems we’re given here to read, or black and white abstractions of ink and paint to look at? But it may be that the question is misdirected entirely. The line between visual poetry and visual art I suspect is – deliberately, creatively – arbitrary. Be that as it may, I read Gaze’s monoprints as something in between, something that either visual poetry or visual art may be when based on the shared quality of non-signifying signification. A hybrid for which questions of genre may be little more than a distraction.
The work that appears in Kernels embodies a consistent aesthetic that at a first pass consists of abstract black forms against white backgrounds. (Gaze came up with the name “kernels” to suggest that the black figures are nuclei drawing the eye’s attention.) Much of it was produced through the process of decalcomania, a design transfer method originally invented in France in the 18th century. Gaze used a modern variation of the method developed in the 1930s by Surrealist Oscar Dominguez and which, as Gaze points out, Dominguez called “decalcomania with no preconceived object.” Dominguez’s innovation was to take decalcomania’s process of design transference and turn it into a method for creating works unburdened by the artist’s conscious or intended content. In essence, this version of decalcomania involves spreading ink or paint on a surface – paper, cardboard, glass, or what-have-you –, pressing a second surface on top of it, and separating the two to reveal a pattern of marks, unwilled by the artist, on the latter. Dominguez’s decalcomania offered a path to image-making that would bypass the potential roadblocks thrown up by the artist’s conscious control. While Gaze made use of his own variations on Dominguez’s method, he also employed other processes. Some of the work in Kernals was collaged, while other pieces were produced by spraying black paint onto mutilated alphabet stencils.
A good number of the results of Gaze’s various methods are suggestive of writing. This isn’t surprising, given Gaze’s long involvement with asemic writing. And in his brief introduction to the collection, Gaze notes that he considers himself a writer more than a visual artist. The Spraypainting series – the pieces created using broken-up letter stencils – most obviously approaches writing in those several instances where elements of the Latin alphabet are discernible. A number of the pieces in the Intersigns series seem to contain ideograms of some unknown sort, although looking at them I’m often reminded of some of the work of the second-generation of postwar American abstractionists. And I should acknowledge that as a general rule I do tend initially to read much of the work in Kernels in terms of automatic, gestural abstract art, no doubt owing as much to my own predispositions and history as to the plain evidence of what is actually on the page. But no evidence is entirely plain, and such a reading doesn’t necessarily fall outside of the rules of this (quasi) language game. As Gaze acknowledges in the introduction,
different readers will come to very different conclusions about what they see on these pages. Just as people perceive different pictures in clouds, they also perceive radically different things in my black shapes.
A comparison of Gaze’s monoprints to Rorschach ink blots is probably unavoidable at this point – there’s a superficial resemblance, although Gaze’s irregular shapes notably lack the symmetry of Rorshach blots — but the crucial difference is that Gaze’s objects are creative objects that solicit creative responses, not diagnostic tools.
*
When I consider work such as Gaze’s, work in which what at first appear to be signs turn out to be quasi-signs empty of specific signification, I often think of Duchamp’s statement “The Creative Act.” For Duchamp, the creative act consists in the “transference” – his term, not to be confused with the psychoanalytic term – of the artist’s meaning-intention to the work. The immediate subject of Duchamp’s thinking was the creation of a readymade – the conversion of an ordinary object into an artwork by virtue of the artist’s creative act of intending it to be an artwork. Duchamp’s transference is a projection that, as André Breton had put it two decades earlier in “The Crisis of the Object,” consists of a desire to objectify a subjective meaning. In effect, to externalize into a material object the artist’s intention, whether or not we understand that intention to be something conscious or unconscious in nature, affective or conceptual, or anything else we can perhaps consign to the vague but easily graspable category of “state of mind.” Or, to use a terminology I’ve employed elsewhere, it’s a way of getting the artist’s world into the work. For present purposes we can bracket Duchamp’s caveat that the transference isn’t guaranteed to work as designed; that the object will embody its intended meaning only partially or otherwise imperfectly.
What the work in Kernels seems to me to be is a kind of work for which there is no transference, at least not in the sense that Duchamp meant it – that is, one conveying a meaning the artist intended for the specific work to have. Here Gaze’s objects seem to me to differ in design from at least one kind of non-representational or non-figurative art that they resemble in appearance. This kind of art, like a musical improvisation or certain types of gestural painting, is meant to attempt to present or represent, to whatever extent such a thing can be represented, the artist’s attunements – to the world in which the work is being made, to the process of working, to the work itself as it develops, and so forth. Attunements, in other words, arising along with and through the production of the work and which, through the process of transference, give the work its meaning. It’s Duchamp’s creative act as real-time self-expression. With Gaze’s monoprints, on the other hand, we seem to have the creative act as self-abnegation. In their manner of making the real-time intention of the artist is bracketed and put out of play. Any appeal to conscious design in considering particular instances is something like a category error – such an appeal would fall outside of the rules of the game. If there is a transference to speak of, it would take place in the pre-compositional stage of production – that stage where the process is designed and intended, paradoxically, as a process to create a work without intention. (We could say that by default it is a process that is, at least on one level, what they are about.) The artist’s transference thus turns out to be a refusal of the transference. We can see this as the motivation behind decalcomania-without-preconceived-object, which provides a mechanical process in which the artist’s intention relative to a specific work is deliberately sidelined and in which the figures and patterns produced are just as much surprising and mysterious in meaning to him or her as they are to the outside observer coming to them for the first time.
Rather than being located in the artist’s specific intention, the seat of meaning consists instead in the material makeup and – closely allied to it – the formal appearance of the object. Not signifying a specific representational intention, the object has to signify itself, it has to intend itself. It has to establish itself as a presence to the viewer; it has to engage the viewer in an ontic relation to itself as an object that’s there as a thing with a particular set of sensual and formal qualities that we recognize as such. Its appearance is its meaning is its intention. I’m reminded here of the usefulness of Umberto Eco’s notion of the intentio operis – the semi-autonomous meaning a work carries by virtue of its formal or sensual makeup, a meaning over and above, or perhaps better, beneath, the meaning the artist intended for it. When this latter is present at all.
In sum, with the work in Kernels and work like it we have – if we want to call it that — the initial transference of the artist setting up a process of non-transference, and the resulting object whose objecthood – its material makeup, its sensual and formal properties, its capacity to take its place vis-a-vis the viewer in an ontic relation – constitutes a meaning of its own. So far so good. We have, in effect, two of the three participants Duchamp invokes in “The Creative Act”: the artist’s intention (here, a non-intention) and the object, which in Duchamp’s formula is the receptacle for the intention. The third participant is the viewer, and in the case of work like Gaze’s, he or she becomes the fulcrum on which meaning pivots. We can even speak of a counter-transference – a transference from the viewer in which meaning is projected back onto the object through the viewer’s interpretive interaction with it. Such an interaction will necessarily be filtered through various aspects of the viewer’s background and dispositions – as for example, I admitted above in describing my own initial response to Gaze’s monoprints – but these latter will themselves mutate and expand in the process.
*
Once we posit the viewer as the one who, through what I’ve called the counter-transference, projects meaning into the object that the artist, through his or her own deliberate choice, has created as a kind of screen upon which to take such a projection, we acknowledge that the object’s meaning doesn’t consist in a fixed and pre-existing content but rather in an event that opens a clearing through which a meaning can emerge. Because it is no longer the province of the artist but rather falls to the viewer, meaning-giving becomes a process or function that isn’t bound to an originary act of creation but instead is something that is replayed every time the object is encountered by a viewer. To be sure, Duchamp asserts that this is the case even in instances where the object’s meaning is originally bestowed on it through the artist’s creative act. But here, in the absence of that initial transference, the onus of meaning lies entirely with the viewer — with the artist’s active encouragement. From the artist’s point of view, the signification of the object is left to chance, and chance is on the side of the beholder – both in the sense of being his or hers to take, and in the sense of favoring whatever he or she in fact hazards in the encounter with the object. That at least is what I see at work in the kind of object we find in Gaze’s Kernels.
I wonder if the encounter with Gaze’s objects – and by extension other creative objects similarly intended as intentionless – counts as an instance of something like Lyotard’s notion of the event: that is, as an experience of an affective or aesthetic nature that necessarily takes place at a level largely if not entirely inaccessible to language’s capacity to represent it properly. Certainly that’s where I find myself when looking at these works and trying to articulate to myself what it is I perceive in Gaze’s black shapes – trying to put my counter-transference into words. I find I can’t do it. That, even though the textures, interaction of forms, and austere environments of black figures spreading out over white fields elicit distinct sensations in response. And I wonder if that inability to articulate my response is an index of the works’ success – an indication, in other words, of their having had an effect at the level they’re designed to aim at. Which perhaps raises an interesting question about asemic work generally: as it breaks the link between the sign and signification, does it also break the link between reception and signification, or at least impede it? It does seem appropriate that the attempt to translate a quasi language composed of nonsignifying signs into language proper is something that has to come up short or to fail entirely. That will be the case whether we decide that Gaze’s monoprints are poetry or painting or whether, as I tend to do, we decide that deciding the matter doesn’t matter. In the end perhaps what Gaze’s monoprints and work like them wish to tell us is that the affective pull of the encounter they facilitate is such that language cannot escape its gravitational field.
