#328-31 Matheme

4 panels, 84 H x 64 W cm each

The title refers to a word constructed by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. It relates to formulas similar to those used in mathematics and logic, but instead, they describe specific areas within his theories about the human psyche and its relationship to the outside world. The purpose is pedagogical, to simplify the transfer of knowledge.

Language does not necessarily refer to phenomena we can experience. It can also be used about purely abstract concepts. That is words that describe ideas completely within the register of language. The problem is that they must also be given a physical form to function as communication. The abstract content they denote thus gives its visual form, paradoxically, even greater significance. The signs become more clearly a part of the material world through their strictly conceptual content.

The characters depicted in the work ($ <> a) are Lacan's matheme for imagination. It is pronounced that the barred subject is in relation to the object-cause of desire (objet petit a). $ symbolizes not only the division of the subject into a conscious and subconscious self but also its experience of lack. Of missing a fundamental part that would make it complete. It is this part that the subject consciously or subconsciously imagines (re)encountering in specific objects or phenomena in the world. But these can never correspond to the inner expectation, and the subject thus finds itself in an insoluble, "impossible" relationship with them. This formula can be described as the primordial driving force behind all human activity, beyond purely physiological urges.

Personally, I experience it denoting my own relationship, as an artist, to art in general and to my own art in particular. But since the symbol signifying the barred subject is also the sign of American dollars, the formula can just as easily describe that it is, in fact, art and capital that are in an (impossible) relationship with each other.