Playing with the Screen: Baroque and the Psychoanalytic Point of View

THE SCREEN

 In the centre of the first room of the V&A’s current exhibition, Baroque: Style in the Age of Magnificence, stands a screen from the Indonesian headquarters of the Dutch East India Company. ^[1] Carved by Chinese craftsmen out of painted and gilded teak, it would have stood before the door of the council room in Batavia Fort, Jakarta. Its purpose was to mask the interior even when the door was open, and so deter unwanted attention. Appropriate to this role, alongside many typically Indonesian characteristics and the arms of Dutch cities, the screen has the figure of Perseus holding a shield with the head of Medusa in its centre.

            The V&A sets out to demonstrate ways in which the Baroque can be considered the first truly global stylistic phenomenon. But extending the style’s boundaries even further than they have traditionally been stretched risks losing coherence. Brian Sewell, writing in the Evening Standard, objects to the screen’s inclusion:

Made in the early decades of the 18th century, it is, as a baroque object, late and in a style so far from innovative that it deserves dismissal as a decorative curiosity that is baroque only by degraded inheritance from things far more beautiful and innovative produced in Europe in the century before. Think of it: a Roman and Catholic style borrowed by dour Dutch Calvinists to be reproduced by Chinese Confucians expatriate in Java. How far in time and distance must the exhibition’s curators travel before they recognise that an object has lost all authority as an example of the Baroque?^[2]

 From a psychological point of view, the very indefinable nature of the Baroque makes it a rewarding concept to explore. If it has endured to such an extent without ever conforming to an agreed definition it must fulfil a function, expressing something that would not be otherwise expressed. Perhaps a clue lies in the fact that it is a concept not only vague but at times contradictory, identified with both artifice and unprecedented realism, scientific discovery and religious faith. In this essay I will use the Indonesian screen - and the V&A exhibition more broadly - as the springboard for an exploration of what the Baroque might mean, one informed by recent psychoanalytic theories for whom  a drama of sight, at once solicited and denied, is central.

 THE BAROQUE     

Sewell describes the screen’s ‘degraded inheritance’. Yet degradation has always been fundamental to an object’s status as Baroque. Not only this, but the dangers of Baroque degradation are precisely that it might be inherited, or passed on like a disease: Francesco Milizia in 1768 describes Borromini, Bernini and Pietro da Cortona as ‘a plague on taste, a plague which has infected a great number of artists’^[3]; in a similar vein, Benedetto Croce isolates ‘this perversion of the arts, dominated by the need to astonish.’^[4]

            If the screen needs to astonish, it achieves this by means of the excessive ornamentation, the Baroque, vegetal flourishes amidst which, Sewell fears, the screen’s formal code becomes illegible:

 ...neither the figure of Perseus holding the shield with the head of Medusa, nor the arms of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Delft and other Dutch cities lurking among the florid decorative scrolls, are to be noticed at first glance.[5]

 Yet the florid ornament is of course integral. It is this sense of excess that defines the ‘perverse’ tendencies of the Baroque - although it is easier to dismiss something as excessive than to say of what it is in excess.

            Excess, it might be argued, is necessarily in relation to the idea of  natural proportion. The Baroque emerges in a period when man’s relationship to nature is changing fundamentally. Perhaps, here, generalisations can be justified to some extent. For the Renaissance, art and its beauty reflect a harmony through which humans find their place in an ordered universe – an exalted place thanks to the attribute of reason. The products of the fifteenth and sixteenth century are pervaded with these neo-Platonic values. So Baroque ‘excess’ is, firstly, relative to a Renaissance (and neo-classical) idea of harmony and utility.

            This is the ‘centralised, standardised “language” of classicism’ to which the Spanish critic, Eugenio D’Ors, opposes ‘the peripheral spontaneity of the multifarious “dialects” of baroque.’^[6] While Baroque’s dialects might be spontaneous, however, they are rarely arbitrary or without consideration. For the seventeenth-century poet, Giambattista Marino, ‘the true rule consists in knowing how to break rules according to contemporary taste’.^[7] Baldinucci, in a life of the artist, quotes Bernini as asserting that ‘going beyond the rules is sometimes necessary.’^[8] But necessary for what?

            Baroque, as we have seen, appears as a retrospective designation from the mid-eighteenth century. But, as the V&A exhibition demonstrates, crucial to the style is the fact that it is an expressive, legible global language of its own: that of abstract power. This is the dark obverse to the polite notion of ‘taste’. And it is a further irony that the Baroque, defined retrospectively for its distasteful qualities, describes a movement obsessed with ‘tastes’ and fashions - all inextricable from the expression of authority.

            A psychoanalytically informed reading of the Baroque might approach this need to represent power – the divine force within human power – and ask why, at a moment when developments in the natural sciences leave politics and religion more uncertain than ever, a style develops that seeks to visually present power as never before. The V&A, for example, highlights one interesting example of a ‘taste’ that travels by displaying Honoré Pelle’s Charles II (1684), a bust in direct imitation of Bernini’s Louis XIV (1665). Bernini’s bust immediately found its imitations across Europe as artists responded to the demands of kings and emperors for their own take on Louis XIV’s iconography. To continue Sewell’s analogy of inheritance, what are the characteristics that allow the gene to survive, passed on? Or, in psychoanalytic terms, which is the otherwise arbitrary detail that enables the fantasy?

            Here, it is the curls. The king’s hair, along with the folds of his drapery, enact a delight in excess – and presents an image of power as aesthetic in itself. The curls might be compared to the foam in Roland Barthes’ semiotics of 1950s advertising: ‘It is well known that it signifies luxury. To begin with, it appears to lack any usefulness... [it has an] abundant, easy, almost infinite proliferation...’.^[9] Alongside the curls of regal portraits are the fountains that erupt in palace grounds over the course of the eighteenth-century, symbolising a mastery of nature and a delight in the sublimated aggression of that mastery. This, in a visual form, is what Slavoj Zizek describes as the ‘obscene supplement to power’.^[10] Zizek, drawing upon Lacan, has written extensively on the aspect of fantasy that shadows power. Wherever power tries to present itself as determined by a cold and inevitable law, fantasy erupts to testify to an obscene enjoyment of its exercise. The curls - like Bernini’s other contribution to Baroque iconography, the rearing horse of the equestrian statue – contribute to power’s phantasmic screen.

            This, therefore, is why Bernini had to break ‘rules’ in the name of ‘taste’. In Robert Harbison’s apology for the style: 

The Baroque is set apart from what precedes it by an interest in movement above all, movement which is a frank exhibition of energy and escape from classical restraint. ^[11]

The expression of force is founded on the breaking of rules. Human artistic and political power becomes evident in the space beyond divine and natural order. According to Sewell, the Dutch-Indonesian screen has ‘lost all authority as an example of the Baroque’, but in so far as it precisely stands for authority - in its very ornament and excess - it can be taken as representative. And when he claims it is ‘in a style so far from innovative that it deserves dismissal as a decorative curiosity’ Sewell misses the crucially mimetic aspect of the Baroque. Baroque is a retrospective designation, but in the seventeenth century there is still something to be recognised by contemporaries: the ornamental language of an abstract, globalised power. It is, above all, a style - to be looked at, read, exported as a signifier in itself. Again, the V&A expresses this well with a print of the Calm Sea Palace, or Haiyantang Palace, outside Beijing, built by an eighteenth-century Chinese Emperor in a European baroque style with elaborate waterworks and a maze.

 THE SIGHTLESS GAZE

 ‘The baroque was about nothing if not display.’^[12] JH Elliott, in his own review of the V&A exhibition, touches upon an aspect of Baroque excess equally fundamental and equally hard to define. What art is not concerned with display? Do we need, somehow, to distinguish between display and depiction? Elliott’s judgement might be better understood as: ‘the baroque was about nothing but display’. But how is this experienced differently by the intended audience? Perhaps we need a more sophisticated account of the relationship between audience and image.

            Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1977)  has been hugely influential in recent accounts of vision, subjectivity and art. For Lacan, the very coherence of a ‘subject’ presupposes that they are already caught in the field of the visible, and under the gaze of an Other. This is the gaze that unifies and coheres the subjective ‘I’/eye in the first place - along with the network of social and political relationships with which a subject must define himself. This is why, in the most famous line of the Four Fundamental Concepts, Lacan asserts: ‘I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.’^[13]  The gaze comes first.

            By reading Lacan’s universal theory of subjectivity back into the Baroque period we might see how far the ‘subject’ of sight might be understood as a political as well as psychological entity. Lacan’s account of the visible must incorporate a subject always already positioned by what he is looking at, so it is no surprise that he draws repeatedly on seventeenth-century art, from analysis of Holbein’s The Ambassadors in the Four Fundamental Concepts, to discussion of Rubens in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and Bernini in Seminar XX.^[14] 

            The concept of ‘display’ is central to Lacan’s theory. Conveniently, for our current purposes, he draws upon Roger Caillois’ The Mask of the Medusa (1960).^[15] It is not entirely coincidental, of course, because the story of the Medusa is the pre-eminent myth of the gaze as a petrifying force. It is worth noting that Callois’ title emphasises the mask – because what he wishes to draw attention to is a sightless, symbolic gaze that functions in the absence of a seer. He describes forms of display in the insect and animal world as having this effect: the patterns of some insects, such as the ocelli on butterfly wings, can hypnotise and frighten their small bird predators. In this way, the birds become the object of a ‘sightless gaze.’

            This allows Lacan, differentiating his theory of vision from earlier accounts, to stress that it is not an explicit encounter with another human that determines the subject: ‘The gaze I encounter...is, not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.’^[16] All creatures are subject to this fascination, but, Lacan notes, only the human subject – conscious of both himself and his vision as representational screens - evades being completely caught up in it. Rather  

he maps himself in it. How? In so far as he isolates the function of the screen and plays with it. Man, in effect, knows how to play with the mask as that beyond which there is the gaze. The screen is here as a locus of mediation.^[17]

 This returns us to mimicry, and to display as a form of power in its own right. As Margaret Iversen writes: ‘Men are not hypnotised by ocelli, but nevertheless harbour a belief in the evil eye and paint giant ocelli on their boats or shields’^[18] - and Medusa on their wooden screens, we can add. The screen is never more Baroque than when it looks back, freezing its audience.

            Before we consider this aspect of Baroque art – its confrontation with the viewer - it is worth asking whether there is something in the period that makes the visible at once especially threatening and especially potent. John Rupert Martin describes how the rise of Baroque from the disintegration of Mannerism is just one way of telling the story. Considered from the standpoint of the history of ideas, ‘the emergence of a new visual realism about the year 1600 presents a rather different aspect’:

 That the artistic vision of the age in which science assumed a predominant role should have been shaped by a concern for verisimilitude in the rendering of the material world can hardly be thought accidental. Seen in this light, Caravaggio and Frans Hals, Velasquez and Vermeer, are true compeers of Galileo and Kepler, of Harvey and Descartes.^[19]        

The visual practices of anatomy, botany and zoology produce an unnerving equivalence between the human and the rest of the material world. They form an uneasy alliance with the Copernican insights of the previous century that were now being digested: 

Amidst a Copernican universe that was challenging its man-measured bearings, the classical (Protagoras) and humanist (Alberti) heritage was shaken. Form was set against a largely unknown and unknowable cosmos in which “you do not come any nearer to proportion, likeness, union and identity with the infinite by being a man than by being an ant.”^[20]

 Significantly, in Martin’s account, the Baroque occurred only when the kind of visual realism used in zoological and other scientific treatises began to be applied ‘not to illustration alone but to the arts of painting and sculpture.’^[21]

            Perhaps a new tension can be felt most interestingly, because most unexpectedly, in the verisimilitude of the northern Baroque art. Even here, as Svetlana Alpers has painstakingly demonstrated, scientific objectivity betrays a latent anxiety. Kepler, Alpers writes, ‘deanthropomorphizes vision. He stands aside and speaks of the prior world picturing itself in light and colour on the eye’. ^[22] The eye becomes a screen (‘ut pictura, ita visio’, sight is like a picture) but one that comes to seem less Cartesian and more Lacanian as Alpers’ account goes on:  

...when we turn to works like the still lifes of Kalf, we have to consider if, more often than scholars have been willing to admit, deception here engages not a moral but an epistemological view: the recognition that there is no escape from representation.[23]

 Alpers draws out the sense of alienation within verisimilitude. It allows the religious Baroque to tell two stories, religious and existential. Martin describes it as ‘typical of the Baroque outlook’ that divine illumination is treated naturalistically, ‘a phenomenon that is at once physical and supernatural’.^[24] But it is light as something almost unendurable. Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew (1599-1600), sees the saint, head bowed, trying to avoid the glare of his vocation. When Guido Reni paints Susannah and the Elders (1620), light exposes Susannah, and exposes us, the viewer, in our complicit voyeurism.^[25] The chiaroscuro of Baroque art enforces a single light-source that picks upon subjects, a gaze internal to the image, in contrast to the diffuse light of earlier Renaissance painting. And it is a small step to transfer this power from the divine to the political. Hobbes’s absolute monarch, like the Sun King himself, is a light that swamps his subjects: ‘though they shine some more, some less, when they are out of his sight: yet in his presence, they shine no more than the stars in the presence of the sun.’^[26]

SUBJECTS AND PATRONS

Light stabs down in golden spikes above the most discussed of Baroque artworks, Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint Teresa in the Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome (1642-52). While the naturally lit window behind the saint is hidden, what we see as spectators is light as an explosion, ecstasy as an overwhelming power. Lacan, infamously, uses this sculpture in his elaboration of the concept of jouissance, an experience of excess pleasure, inseparable from pain, and found beyond the limit of thought and language: ‘What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but they know nothing about it’.[27] Lacan’s positing of a ‘feminine’ jouissance that cannot articulate itself contributed to the general controversy of this seminar. Yet a thoughtlessness, or speechlessness, is at the heart of many traditional critiques of the Baroque: 

the very fact that the declared aim of Baroque poetics was the ‘marvellous’, which implies the suspension of the intellectual faculty, demonstrates in what zones of the human mind propaganda was to act through the image – on the imagination in fact, considered as the source and impulse of feelings, which in their turn were to be forced into action.^[28]                                    

Likewise, when Croce criticises the Baroque’s perverse will to ‘astonish’ in relation to the Counter-Reformation it is in terms of a general ‘oppression of speech and thought’.^[29] The V&A presents the standard line on the counter-reformation: that it sought to recapture hearts and minds. But objects such as the screen and the chapel draw our attention to control of the gaze as an end in itself.

            In defence of the most propagandist elements of the visual Baroque, Peter Davidson questions 

the affront of what is seen as ‘‘Catholic Kitsch”, the religious emotion which comes forward to meet the spectator fully formed. Where is the affront – is it really that things are being made easy for the poor, the tired, those who have no education?^[30]

 But perhaps the affront is felt regarding the spectator who must come forward, fully formed, to these images. Less often discussed in relation to the Cornaro chapel are the members of the Cornaro family, its patrons, who Bernini sculpted sitting in pews like opera boxes, ranged on both sides. Not one of the patrons themselves has an angle of sight on Teresa’s ecstasy. Are they more concerned with the performance enacted beneath them by us, the spectator, caught up in the image they have funded?

            Art is a distinct area of the ‘visible’. For Lacan it is one area in which humans might play with the screen of representation – the screen behind which remains the threatening gaze. But the interplay of artist, artwork and audience is always complicated by an appeal to a gaze beyond. As in the general realm of the visible, our experience hinges upon an imagined third-party Other. Turning first to early religious imagery, specifically icons, Lacan describes how these ‘undoubtedly have the effect of holding us under their gaze’ (my italics). But 

there is more to it than that. What makes the value of the icon is that the god it represents is also looking at it. It is intended to please God. At this level, the artist is operating on the sacrificial plane – he is playing with those things, in this case images, that may arouse the desire of God.[31]

Over the course of the Renaissance, this third-party Other moves from the heavens to the court. Lacan calls this next stage ‘communal’ and cites the great hall of the Doges’ Palace with its paintings of battles such as Lepanto, as an example.

The social function, which was already emerging at the religious level, is now becoming clear. Who comes here? Those who form what Retz calls ‘les peuples’, the audiences. And what do the audiences see in these vast compositions? They see the gaze of those persons who, when the audience are not there, deliberate in this hall. Behind the picture, it is their gaze that is there.[32]

 It is in this way that art has the status of the animal kingdom’s mimetic forms of display. It is defensive as well as seeking to lure; or, to put it another way, it lures so as to defend itself. In this pre-empting of the gaze it can even be compared to camouflage, the artist offering whatever he can in order to evade his own capture:

The function of the picture – in relation to the person to whom the painter, literally, offers his pictures to be seen – has a relation with the gaze. This relation is not, as it might at first seem, that of being a trap for the gaze....The painter gives something to the person who must stand in front of his painting which, in part, at least, of the painting, might be summed up thus – You want to see? Well, take a look at this! He gives something for the eye to feed on, but he invites the person to whom this picture is presented to lay down his gaze there as one lays down one’s weapons. This is the pacifying, Apollonian effect of painting. Something is given not so much to the gaze as to the eye, something that involves the abandonment, the laying down, of the Gaze.[33] 

If art is a defensive gesture on the artist’s part – fending off the gaze of whichever big Other – God or Monarch – has him in their sights, how are we to read the acts of patronage themselves? Here, the monarch commissions beauty to present to the public. The ‘laying down of the gaze’ that the art demands can be associated, on a straightforward level, with the general ‘downcast eyes’ of the court – the monarch’s control of a scopic regime as central to his or her own power. But we can also ask what it is the people are not allowed to see beyond the screen. If power in the sixteenth and seventeenth century becomes increasingly aesthetic, perhaps this defends against a new appetite of the gaze that is in danger of uncovering a terrifying absence.

            Does science, against expectations, provide an environment for absolutism? Power finds its new role in patronage, the providing of pleasure. It is comparable to the Lacanian superego whose relentless, imperious injunction is: Enjoy! Maiorino suggests that ‘if romantic minds found at the very core of life the diasparactive triad of ruin, incompleteness and fragmentation, their baroque ancestors would have sought ways for mending the pieces.’^[34] In practical terms, the ‘ancestors’ with this responsibility were those with the power of patronage. We might ask whether they sought ways to mend or merely disguise the ruins.

            ‘If one wishes to deceive a man, what one presents to him is the painting of a veil,’ Lacan writes.^[35] The Baroque, of course, has no end of veils, folds and curls, as we have seen, as well as fetishised illusions such as the trompe l’oeil to which Lacan repeatedly returns in his analysis of art’s pleasures.^[36] But the fetish, in Freud’s account, averts confrontation with a lack. Zizek notes: ‘The fantasy which underlies the public ideological text as its non-acknowledged obscene support simultaneously serves as a screen against the direct intrusion of the Real.’ The Real, in Lacan’s scheme, designates the traumatic space where symbolic and imaginary supports fail.^[37] The Indonesian screen reflects the concerns of its time when it positions the spectator physically and ideologically by means of its petrifying gaze. But it is most Baroque when it seeks to mask the absence where power is meant to reside.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alpers, Svetlana, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (London:    Penguin, 1989)

Argan, Giulio, The Baroque Age (NY: Rizzoli, 1989)

Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (Paladin, 1973)

Boucher, Bruce, Italian Baroque Sculpture (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998)

Caillois, Roger, The Mask of Medusa, trans. George Ordish (London: Victor Gollancz, 1964)

Davidson, Peter, The Universal Baroque (Manchester, 2007)

Elliott, JH, ‘Divine Inspiration’ in The Guardian (4/4/09)

Harbison, Robert, Reflections on Baroque (London: Reaktion, 2000)

Iversen, Margaret, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (Penn UP, 2007)

Lacan, Jacques, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan             (Penguin: London, 1977)

            -- The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, trans. Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992)

            - Seminar XX - On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, trans.   Bruce Fink (NY: Norton, 1996)

Maiorino, Giancarlo, The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts (Penn UP,             1990)

Martin, John Rupert, Baroque (London: Allen Lane, 1977)

Sewell, Brian, ‘Baroque was First Age of Bling’, Evening Standard (3/4/09)

Zizek, Slavoj, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997)