Ba Fer

Treading Blindly, or the Excessive Presence of the Object

A metaphorics of blindness, which informs both theories of optics and psychoanalysis, finds perhaps its most compelling and frequent expression in the image of the blind man. This familiar image would seem immediately to circumvent the question of femininity and so reassert the Oedipal scenario and the father-son axis which it privileges. The aim of this essay, on the other hand, is to re–imagine the place of ‘not seeing’ in an account of femininity and representation, and to insist on the place of disturbances of vision in such an account. Drawing upon Freuds discussion of ‘hysterical blindness’, I consider the implications of blotting out sections from the field of vision as they may figure in the excessive effects of the art object. The focus of the essay is the work of Eva Hesse and the younger British sculptor Rachel Whiteread and in particular their floor pieces (though I also discuss Andre, Nauman and others). I attempt to map out a terrain of fantasy and an uneasy psychic scenario which gets played out in the spaces of sculpture. Whitereads work is preoccupied with forgotten or unseen spaces, the underside of a floor, for instance, and the essay speculates on such moves to make the invisible visible, or to turn an inside outside. The question of floor-bound sculpture is addressed from the point of view of shifts in sculpture in the mid-1960s and why such a format for sculpture should remain so compelling now.