Reading Between Clouds

I forgot my sunglasses in the Parc des Princes in Paris. Literally this time, whatever the location might signify to this loss figuratively. I have family in Paris. I spent some time with my son there, this summer.

In Forgot Sunglasses my show at gallery Layr in Vienna this spring, I exhibited among other works a series of pictures called Family. Family are close-up portraits of our turned off family tablet, drowning in fingerprints. They are edited in Photoshop. They helplessly linger somewhere between representation and abstraction. They could suggest painting rather than photography at first, or from afar. Some of the pictures appear to collapse in on themselves. Some look cloudy. Do they hold us, something of us? I think they do. They are very varied. There are dark brown ones that remind me of animals and appear as if there would be tons of time in them. Within the series or under the same title/name there's one picture of a McDonald's family Mm that I took a few years back in Paris. It seems to bleed. Some cyan of a screen in the background leaks cyan. All these pictures once again underline an obvious if oblique relationship between Photoshop and weakness.
Reading Between Clouds can be read as an extension or tail of Forgot Sunglasses. For EXPOSURE I added a new picture to the series, Family (Clouds). It pictures my son on a train. It's turned upside-down and thereby places a turned off tablet in the upper part of the picture, turning it into a small rectangular sky. Actually lying on the train table of the family compartment of Deutsche Bahn beside a blurry book, Jamieson Webster's Leben und Tod der Psychoanalyse, it reflects clouds and leaks some blue sky. A blue very close to, but not the same as the cyan which leaks in Family (Mm). Clouds even when white could very well elicit rain. The blue leaking line “finger painted” in Photoshop might evoke my fingers gently stroking my laptop, and/or my son's face.

C. brings me lovely golden raining cloud earrings from Brazil, where it did rain.

Clouds appear in the introduction of Webster's book Conversion Disorder, when she writes about knowledge. How knowing clouds the listening of the analyst. How expectations always get in the way. That Lacan with a nod to Aristophanes' play The Clouds said psychoanalysis takes place by listening between clouds.
On p. 21 she writes: Important for Lacan in this parable is that we not give in to the desire to force a clearing. This will only end in bamboozle or chaos. We have to listen between clouds – something material is suspended there.

I love this idea of listening between clouds of something similar to understanding, but not quite to understand, rather compehend, maybe. Of trusting in the unconscious to hear what we need to hear instead of insisting on knowing. How could we know?

What are the clouds in this text? What is suspended in them? What do I want (you) to hear between them? Can you hide expectations in/behind clouds? Do you hear the rain then? Would I know?

I recently saw Vera Palme's show Frankfurter Kreuz at Bizarro, Copenhagen, online. In the tiny exhibition space she painted a sky, blue with white clouds, Skystudie (2023). Skystudie, covered the whole low ceiling of this cellar, plastered with wires and pipes. A very touching gesture, quite beautiful in its bland literalness and site-specificity. Size variable. It bounds together and protects her five small oil paintings on view well. No rain.
And I will never forget Misha Stroj's huge black papier-mâché cloud and its many proportionally huge, oversize sunny-sky-blue raindrops and puddle in the same blue in Context, Form, Troy, a group show in Secession some time in the early 2000s in Vienna. How I was amazed and moved by their adequate size. They were literally big enough to reveal quite a bit of urgency, desire.
And, I guess the first rain in art that moved me, were two very small black and white pictures of Judith Hopf's Emptiness (1997) illustrating Sabeth Buchmann's text about her practice, Rain Is a Cage You Can Walk Through, Texte zur Kunst, Issue 37, and my imaginations of it. A cloud-shaped pile of cotton, a shower head, and dripping water. It was modest, perfect, and wet.

rain – ruin
The fingerprints on some of the Family pictures look cloudy, but it doesn't rain. Though as mentioned above, the possibility of rain is always a given with clouds, is already/readily suspended in them. What comes open (aufgehen) in clouds? What do we do with desire? What does the hysteric desire? She keeps playing on my mind. I can't stop reading about her. About Lacan's reading of her. How she's all about questions, questions everything, is irreducibly ambivalent, and deeply caught up in not-knowing and desire. She desires desire. She's too much. She's too many things. And she continues to be.
About hysteria Webster writes in Conversion Disorder, p. 119f: It is something Lacanians talk about with a special aura (the hysteric!), which implies some kind of rarified knowledge, despite the fact that it is about what cannot be known. And: Desire is rendered as pure form and formal movement, set adrift, creating in its wake a demand for this drift and a counterdemand set against it. Hysteria's disappearing act--showing us the formal characteristics of the drive, the reliance on a game of presence and absence, and the potential instigation of a desire that spreads outward, that refuses to stay still, locked into any one set of meanings.
Does she see the same things? She would love to. Though something, her position needed to shift. Where is she? What's her position? Does she need sunglasses? How inevitable is her disappointment? And shift how? She slips away. She really doesn't know.

Forgot Sunglasses described what is not there or (nothing but) a wish. Maybe just its margins. Beside the series Family and other works, there were Objet petit a and Objet petit a (Sundown) on view. Two pictures depicting anew my formal fantasy of Lacan's objet petit a, according to him the object-cause of desire. Or rather my quite literal reading of it.
I hadn't yet known of Lacan's use of The Clouds or read Webster's Conversion Disorder, when linking the objet petit a to emoji raindrops due to their visual resemblance.
Rain moves. Years ago, I visualised the objet petit a as counters/holes of small a letters, lost forever in a gradient, a gradient as a means of affection (Rührung). They bring to mind single raindrops. For my former exhibition with gallery Layr, Eyes hold things differently (2021), I did move the objet petit a into the rain. Let it rain desire, or rather object-causes of desire.
Objet petit a and Objet petit a (Sundown) somehow appear to try to touch themselves by Photoshop-“finger-painted” lines circling the objet petit a's. Are they restless? Perhaps they are trying to find their boundaries. Or are trying to reach (out). Or these lines might suggest something like tape or ribbon, a tape or a ribbon which is not yet attached to anything else. A wish to connect. I always suspected the objet petit a to be rather passive. Who needs to move is always me.

A movement occurs from the newer works to the older ones, from the fingerprints of the Family works to the “finger paint” in Photoshop of the Objet petit a works. It's important to move.

Maybe you could read the fingerprints as a reverse/inverse or the other of the objet petit a.

C. thought that the Objet petit a pictures might look too similar to the Family pictures, that their colours conflate them too much, and you might not read/understand them as a reverse/inverse or other. But when I thought about it, I liked exactly that, to suggest their proximity. While approaching from different angles, both series touch on something similar, or a wish. They seem to abandon and anticipate something. Or this was/would be the idea.

I like illustrations. I think about relationships and movement. There's an attempt to play tennis. I thought that tennis would/might be a good illustration for relationships per se, though the aim/idea in tennis is to hit the ball in a way that the other cannot hit it back easily. This is where desire comes in. Some of the pictures fail to play tennis. In EXPOSURE a tennis ball is stuck between the wall and one of the pictures. More than any other ball, the neon yellow of the tennis ball indicates a wish to be seen, to not be missed (before and after hitting a floor).

I like literalness. I loved the pictures of too big New York dogs squeezed into Ikea, et al. bags with holes cut in for their legs, their paws dangling down just centimetres over the ground, that popped up everywhere after this new law came into effect, that allowed only dogs that fit into bags into New York's subway.
Does literalness give way to the/a real? Does it get you closer to any reality? To touching a ground (like rain). A ground where you can rest, where the rain disappears. Dogs need to move too. It's calming to touch the ground.

I still don't know what literally will come/fall out of this text. What it will finally lose. I am interested for quite some time already in what literally or really comes/falls out of pictures and/or texts like this (and which besides lets them open into something social, occasionally). I like redundancy and non-performances. Performances that are mundane, mere gestures, or very boring.

The naturalness (Selbstverständlichkeit) or reality of the relationships of others. Squeezing your biggest dog into a bag and/or how to relate to the world every day. I have so many questions.
Niklas Taleb's work was the first photographic position in contemporary art in quite some time that deeply touched me. First, I wasn't quite sure why. Then, I thought that it had something to do with relationships, or a/his being in relation with the world that his pictures convey so beautifully. The possibility of just that, all that. They talk about a surprisingly tender way to relate to this world, that I have somehow lost or don't have, cannot touch upon, or now. Or/And I needed/need help to see. Looking at his pictures made me aware of that. There's a similar direction, maybe a similar need to what I try, or want. They describe a bond. Or his ability of bonding, and they are revealing relationships per se, to me at least. Maybe even faith. Love? They touch a wish. Perhaps because they seem to lack the brutal question, an utterly disappointed, or is it disillusioned Really? that too often hangs in the air (Hang in there!), where I find myself. I forget to move. What doesn't move?

My pictures seem forever delayed between representation and abstraction. Which feels weary for someone as impatient as me. I'm surprisingly slow. Being slow isn't the same as taking one's time. I'm running out of time constantly. I'd need the world’s patience. I'd need the world to be patient with me. Is this a response? Was there a question? I wish.

I swim alternately in expectations and explanations (understanding).

How do you assert something as a margin of what is not there, that somehow might just be a wish. How does a wish per se look like? What visually evokes wish? Am I in your dreams? Is Nicolas Cage? I'm a bad actor=networker. To take one's time is sexy. Even if only to stand around in dreams' of others. I too often don't behave in concert with what I want. Am impatient, too confused by insecurities of others and mine, realise dreams badly. I'm looking forward to watching Dream Scenario.

It's a quite hysterical Really?, I guess, the Really? that seems to be in my way so often. And of course it's a question. And a real, not a rhetorical one most of the time. Does Really? as a question, strike the real? Or does it only describe the fear of it? And what does it say about the sense of reality of the questioner? A lot is well suspended (aufgehoben) in Really?. Where is the hook/catch (Haken)? Nobody picks up (aufheben) anything.

The production of truth/s. The impossible position of the hysteric. Her real demands (needs). Her, held in questions. Her question, What am I? She needs, depends on an answer, an answer from the Other. And there is none, or there is silence. No hold. There's an innocence about her love. All the love she … All potential love. Is she impossible? She's oblivious of what passes her by when absorbed by desire. Socially? The subject‘s darkness (Subjektfinsternis) consists in the disappearance of the subject. She is without knowing. How? Are my wishes impossible? And where is her place? She can't wait. What do I want? Then what (am I)?
Dealings with desire and what isn't there or (nothing but) a wish or maybe just its margins. Some things can only be shown/told via their margins. Are held in margins. In/between clouds.
In A Few Words on Hysteria, Lacan says in Brussels, 1977: .. the hysteric subject is the divided subject, to say it in other words, it is the unconscious at play. And: What our clinical practice reveals, reveals to us, is that knowledge, unconscious knowledge, has a reference to love. How can this reference be made productive for art? How is the hysteric's relationship to love? As difficult as you would guess. How operative is her loneliness? She doesn't answer. Does she know? How must love flow into art, if an attempt is to touch? How can an attempt stay fluent, not stagnate? How then must weakness show?

In Psy-Fi, Cancelling Sexuality (ft. Jamieson Webster), a conversation with Douglas Lain, in May 2022, Webster says, ca. min 33: … but when it comes to human relationships, we understand nothing.

To try to deal with desire and what is not there is as tiring, as it is disorganising, and at times far too time-consuming, which hurries her on and slows her down. She really wouldn't know.

To read/listen to Jamieson Webster calms me. How much of a hysteric am I? Little enough to borrow from her discourse? What does calm mean? How hysterical is my work? How does tiredness appear in pictures? How happiness? Who needs me calm? Or how could/should they appear? I remember hours of listening to interviews with and lectures by Webster while walking around not far from Mierendorffplatz in some off-part of Moabit or having a hot chocolate at timeless, the Mexican restaurant. My son's football practice had moved inside this gym for some weeks in winter, which gave me a reason to be there (somewhere) three afternoons a week. An excuse or window to walk and to listen, to be with myself. It was perfect. We both enjoyed every minute of his two-hours practice. And I loved how these afternoons in a drizzly cold dark or a brightly lit Mexican restaurant in some nowhere of a winterly Berlin could make me feel content and calm, happy.

I read Tao Lin's Leave Society. It talks about relationships, about family too, and it's quite tender as well. Quite beautiful. He too, saw rain, p. 249: Saw rain. He struggles to be in relation, to relate to the world. And yet there's something uncomplicated in his work, like there's in Taleb's. A certain clarity, or maybe rather more access/acceptance. I do love what both his and Taleb's works do. How they take their time. What they do to me. Even if, or because, they at times at least also make me feel more lost, barred (?) or lonelier still, confront me with my impossibility, with my desires towards the world, or for a position in it, who am I in it?, and/or a real relation, even if difficult, or disorganising with it. I envy what they seem to have. Or their works to me suggest they do. It's not that they do not speak about loneliness, but it is never without an awareness of the other, never, it seems, without words. They seem to know how to listen. There's a rare calmness. Patience? Fewer questions. At least they appear to be closer to something (what?) that I wish I would be closer to, as well.

The dumb world and one's position in it. holding back – holding a background … taking hold

Or as Phung-Tien Phan puts it in the beginning of her podcast, The Podcast City that later takes another lighter turn, when she has an easily relatable, and quite funny conversation with a friend about her new film project over a cup of coffee and besides beautifully displays friendship: Today's topic is another Princess Diana Carolyn Bessette Kennedy paparazzi look alike editorial, and I'm gonna slit my throat open and make sausage out of my own blood to monetize on that.

I remember thinking someday that I'd be a pretty good guy. Being a woman feels confusing at times. I still don't, or less and less do know, how to deal with the abyss of the structural inequality between men and women in a charming, fun or at least somehow attractive, sexy(?) way. I don't know how to not read it everywhere as limiting, an insult/impertinence, really. And it is boring. Makes men boring. From the beginning this inequality was linked to our questioning (see also Alenka Zupančič in an Interview with Egon Hamza and Frank Ruda, Crisis & Critique Vol. 6, issue 1, https://terada.ca/discourse/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Crisis-and-Critique-Zupancic-Interview.pdf). Don't you have any questions? And the hysteric who can be any gender of course, doesn't quite understand, wonders what it means to be feminine. Doesn't know. Being a woman is still a problem. Nothing's exactly smooth. He takes it all. The coffee too. And easily, with ease. And he always does.
She wants more choices. Answers. Addressees.
You need to move to respond. I only slowly and only sometimes stumble towards a gentler, more reparative view. Do I know what I am in control of? What keeps me soft? She can't resist. Do we really look for different things?
What do I claim? What position?
What remains contained? Social and structural conditions, or how they are fucked-up? The disorganising messiness of sex?
What is enough, and when is it enough? Good-enough? She's timeless. She was there. She was not. She's all over the place, really.
And love?
We give what we don't have.

There are no words in my dreams. Or I don't find them at the moment. Do I not listen? Is there nothing to say? Pictures yes, bodies, but words rarely. A bit like not finding sunglasses, or the need for them, or the sun. Is there sun? Do we need words to understand what we want? Am I too calm or happy? I don't understand my dreams' silence. Are they just less ambitious? Too often they also end lazily in the middle before anything is resolved or happens really. Where did the words go? We relate to one another via words. Nicolas Cage doesn't speak. Do I talk too much when I'm awake? I guess. They are quite radical. We are supposed to constantly communicate. Or do I simply not remember them? It's too hot to connect.

I see a picture with someone in a Justin Bieber bathing suit. I was not wearing a bathing suit picturing Justin Bieber this summer. But I would probably buy one when I get a chance. I don't think I ever consciously listened to any song by him, nor do I necessarily aim to, but he does evoke a certain time, innocence, and aversion that does speak to some kind of funny provocation of the real, which I would think me in this bathing suit might trigger, smiles and all.

What about the absence generated in pictures? Their excess of overly present absence? The absence she loved. Could it hold/show desire? My doubts? Clouds (noun) move (verb). I don't know what I would do without Photoshop. Photoshop as a means to play on (my) weakness. Smoothing over what I saw. Imagining by means of Photoshop what I cannot. What I don't see. I buy in Photoshop, what isn't there or hides underneath. I touch pictures till they move (me). I loosen, flatten, fatigue, deflate, or suspend them. Make them fall or fail. They change. Things change. It just takes a lot of time.

Family (Clouds) is the first picture I exhibit in a very long time that depicts a person, a body, my son. What do I say by not showing bodies in my pictures? What lack does this speak to? Bodies need attention. Is it my kid's body to speak in the most innocent way about my body, my sexuality? I don't know. My bending photographing body is apparent in my pictures anyway. Is this enough? Are they sexy? And why sexuality now? Does it rain? To change something in reality. Is a lack of desire as disorganising as desire? Would I know what? Do I have enough sex? In the preface of Disorganisation & Sex, Webster writes: Sex has the power to bring something revelatory, a satisfaction that we name sexual which changes something in reality.

The Really's? blocking me are more than just touching disappointment or defence. It's the mere fear of touching something possibly truer than I'd be comfortable to handle. Something bare, raw. Of touching the/a real. Of catching up. Catching something. Being caught.

The reality of the body, its presence. Is a body too real? Yes. Would my own body be too literal? For what? I need to pee. A body like desire can maybe only be captured via its margins. I want to be in my body more. Not clinging to clouds too far from any ground. Closer to me. Really take space. Bodies move/fall, may fall apart. How much disorder does the body need to feel real? And the artist's body? How porous does it need to be? How open? To reveal what? Needs.
Does one need to feel at home in these Really's?, lose oneself in them, swim in them, to arrive anywhere, and/or is this all there is?? Is this what you do? Let reality be a game with subtractions, and inevitable separations? Is the simple truth that I would have to feel at ease, make myself at home in my Really's? In this all of an Is this all there is? Use them as hints or hinge to be in touch? Would I be more free/me? Be part, and take part in something really in reality? Can something come of a compromise? What we have is each other. Could a promise? What does compromise desire? There is promise in compromise. Could there be desire in compromise, in some of its inevitable folds? Sort of. There must be. Or do these Really's? hint to what doesn't make sense, is ridiculous? To senselessness. Where you could relax or be hilarious, laugh about yourself.

Immobility, or could cereal be of any help to avoid helplessness in face of the real, or reality, or for me? The impossible feeling of not being in control, being alive. I picked a stupid fight over cereal once. With someone, I loved bringing home the “wrong” cereal. Although Z. had chosen it. And the supermarket that they went to simply did not have what I had wanted them to buy. I was furious. It was pathetic, really. I was desperate and overwhelmed in a way I couldn't pin down at all then. I seemingly couldn't accept this insufficient answer, full of sugar and/but bio. This “wrong” object. We didn’t love each other well. I was immobile, and thus complicit. Too much was wrong or broken yet. Or my complicity was my immobility. And all my desperation spilled out over some too sweet Zimties. Thinking about it in retrospect, cereal, Zimties represent some kind of sweet signifier. They remain a weird reminder for me to look/move, to be in touch, and to also accept/receive something else or contingent than whatever I thought I needed or were looking for initially. Something real, after all. A strange future. A reminder of being alive. And a reminder of how difficult it is at times to identify a signifier in time or what could function as one, that even Zimties could. That each of my Really's? could very well be a signifier. A signifier of something real I should probably look at more closely and maybe deal with or change.

Fewer images. I didn't take a lot of pictures of this relationship. I wasn't conscious about this then. Now, I think, I would love to have been taking pictures of us or rather pictures that say something, anything about (the mysteries/secrets of) the elusiveness of relationships per se and our relationship while we were together. How does a relationship per se look like? Of the dynamics, all that's in between, all that was or might have been apparent in everything around us, between us. Something of the fragility of the dynamics of love(rs). How much family could have been readable in these pictures? How much reality? Assumptions are at first invisible/unmediated/immediate. Or how could assumptions of what one thinks of a matter that concerns two (or three) be visualised? How do we visualise what we don't know? What we don't understand? How would I have captured the (literal, real) space between our distinct narratives, his and mine, then? The ground is barely touching my favourite shoes. I am hardly perceptible. I didn't listen between clouds. I was too loud. A picture in which this Zimties package would have been on view somewhere, the wrong cereal, the real real, would maybe have mediated our immobility, somehow. Would I have seen things differently?

When do I perceive things/something? Some pictures are more probable. Some are portals. Some pictures (can) hold what we don't know. Some love to circumscribe openings or love. At least when they're weak enough or after being photoshopped.

Photography describes a relation between light and delay, which both don’t make a good or tangible partner. It can be read as a figure of negativity or a medium for Aufhebung.

This summer, I thought that if I had twins I would call one Apple and the other Strudel to have a reason to hysterically shout Apple Strudel over playgrounds and streets, what a beautiful word to shout. Z. found that only mildly funny. I'd love to and do try to be a funny mom, still. I don't eat apple strudel. I just like the word. Though I love all things breakfast at any time of day. It grounds me. And because, as mentioned before, I'm interested in what quite literally or really might fall out of pictures or texts, there should have been Zimties for everyone, now. They're great, even if they're too sweet. But quite fittingly they don't produce them any more, so instead there will be Bio-Zimt-Minis and Bio-Zimt-Cornflakes which could be too sweet as well. And they feature many white clouds in a very blue sky on their packages. I bought them here. They fell out of this text. Enjoy!

Webster says in Conversion Disorder, p. 20: Truth gives the appearance of being the source, what emerges from the clouds, but this is just an effect; the two--truth and clouds--are always found together. The clouds hold the point of conversion like rain, showing that it is not a property of either philosophy or knowledge but of a process.

Somewhere she writes about the beauty of the hysterics’ wishes, and it’s true that her wishes are beautiful, all this hope and love, so much love. Though at times she's sad. Sad as smoking. Sad as dishwater. As dishwater when the sink is clogged, and it needs to be carried in a brim-full pan to a toilet two rooms away. Or is it just some annoyingly ambient allergy that makes her cry? Smoking and rain don't go together well. And the sun lies on the street. And the cars don't care.

Eileen Myles edits a book called Pathetic Literature. In her introduction, she writes: ...language is the loss that repairs. I'd love to trust her with that.

What does the hysteric want? Lacan answers: “You'll see!” (Jamieson Webster, Conversion Disorder, S.124)

Well.

Dreams