Where
most of the psychology of the past century did its best to ignore this divided
subject, writers and artists have been the main groupings outside the world of
psychoanalysis to acknowledge the facts of the unconscious. Today's market-led
societies have less and less space for the idea that a part of human activity
does not serve instrumental aims such as the acquisition of wealth, power or happiness.
They don't want to know about unconscious desire, infantile sexuality, hatred,
self-destruction and despair. This is exactly
the area that writers and artists colonise. They explore not the rational goals
of human activity but what blocks these pursuits, the impediments that give human
life its richness and its agony. By taking these dark threads and magnifying them,
they are faithful to the mysterious world of desires and defences Freud mapped
out in The Interpretation of Dreams
Unconscious
desire needs something to help it pass through the barriers of repression. So
it hitches a ride with a conscious wish, the kind of preoccupation, worry or fantasy
we might think about in our waking state. This mechanism of hitching, which Freud
called the dreamwork, is exactly what is at stake in many projects of art and
literature. In his study "Persecution and the Art of Writing", Leo Strauss catalogued
the ways writers used details to express themselves in regimes where free speech
was prohibited. The message would be concealed between the lines. The same processes
may function in visual art, as we see in the work of the Russian artists Ilya
and Emilia Kabakov, who are currently showing at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Working in Moscow for many years under a regime where artistic expression was
severely limited by state control, they compared their works with the dreams described
by Freud. On the surface it seemed that an obvious point was being made, but an
attention to the detail showed a subversive message.
This
brings us to the real interface between Freudian dream theory and literary and
artistic production. What counts is less what is said than how it is said. It
has nothing to do with content: it is not about sex or the Oedipus complex or
murderous wishes. If these are universals of human life, what matters is how they
are articulated. And, as Freud showed, the key lies in censorship.
The
surrealists provide the best example. Here was a group of writers and artists
who, for the most part, were keen readers of Freud and who had paid careful attention
to his theory of dreams. They knew about the sexual drives, about Oedipal desires,
about the castration complex. Although figures like André Breton changed
their views about Freud at different moments of their careers, art historians
tell us how surrealism and psychoanalysis went hand in glove.
Yet
how exactly did Freud's dream theory inspire the surrealists? The unconscious
desires Freud brought to light are, in fact, no more present than in any other
art movement. But what we do find are the mechanisms of the dreamwork, the ways
desire slips through the nets of censorship. When a desire cannot be represented
consciously, Freud showed, it will take on the form of some absurdity. Two objects
that could never be juxtaposed in reality become so in the dream: an artichoke
and a human head, a fish and a bicycle. They are condensed into one, as a way
of disguising desire.
This is just what the surrealists
took from Freud. When Max Ernst made his Oedipus pictures, he didn't show a boy
with his mummy, but hybrids of animal and human figures in unreal scales and situations.
These juxtapositions could not happen in real life, just as in Dalí's work
we continually see things next to each other that couldn't be so empirically:
bodily fragments next to landscapes and rocks, strange creatures part-human part-animal,
machines with flesh, living bodies and objects improbably enlarged and reduced
in scale. These impossible creations are the results of the dreamwork described
by Freud: where desire cannot be represented directly, it takes the form of a
distortion of reality, a strange convergence of the elements of our everyday life
in bizarre and impossible configurations. The title of the big Tate show on surrealism
a few years back, Desire Unbound, was thus misleading: desire for the surrealists
was absolutely bound, and it was the mechanisms of binding and distortion that
so inspired them.
Through this technique, the
surrealists did for art what Freud did for dreams, slips of the tongue and symptoms.
Rather than seeing them as contingent and meaningless aspects of existence, worthy
of little attention, he turned them into enigmas to be deciphered. With surrealism,
a painting or sculpture or collage became less an object to be looked at than
a question. The works of art made their viewers ask: what does this mean? Just
like a dream, they called out to be interpreted. Art became less an access to
meaning than a barrier to it, one which none the less held out the promise of
interpretation.
· Darian Leader is
chairing the Serpentine Gallery Conference: Dreams, Literature and Art on Wednesday.
Tickets: 08700 600 100. Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: The House of Dreams is at the
Serpentine Gallery, London, SW7, until January 8.
