Annotated Bibliography for The Story of Ego
2011 Dorothy Hoover Research Award
Beck, Samuel J. PhD. “The Rorschach Test: A Multi-Dimensional Test of Personality,” An Introduction to Projective Techniques ed. Anderson and Anderson (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1951).
Psychologist Stewart Wilson PhD recommended this comprehensive guide to projection techniques, which includes an in depth outline of the Rorschach method in chapter four. This chapter deals exclusively with Rorschach: all types of response and their meaning, criticism of the test, procedure and overview of how they are constructed and conducted. The volume also qualifies that “every subject’s responses are not the consequence of sheer accident but are determined by psychological attributes of that subject” (33). Hence, a recording of the subject’s response gives the examiner a window into the well being of the conscious and unconscious mind. This text was considered a required reading in psychoanalysts’ instruction at the peak time of the Rorschach test.
This introduction steeped my concentration in Rorschach’s method to the extent that I am able to conduct my own version of the test from blots I have constructed and embellished on the left side only. From this volume I would learn that asymmetry is more of a challenge for the subject’s imagination, a task suitable for the DRPT thesis class. Instead of psychoanalysing the class (for which I do not have the credentials), I use their anonymously documented responses to an identical sequence of blots, in order to determine what Beck calls the popular response signified by the letter P. “It represents a surface interest, not necessarily a sincere wish, to be in conformity… obeisance that we all make to the fact that we are part of a social group with which we want to identify” (109). What this collective response will provide is an idea of the predominant hues associated with the blot. What they see inspires colour choice and rendering of saturation. When these informed watercolour compositions are layered with my initial ink work the affect will provide the viewer a vivid experience of interpretation that resonates on an unconscious level. Their collective understanding is a contribution, and whether communicated or not, is one of the end goals of my thesis project.
Borges, Jorge Luis. “Kafka and His Precursors,” Labyrinths (New York: New Directions Publishing, 1962).
Labyrinth is one of the themes I started with when I began thesis. I had the idea to construct one physically, which even for the ambitious likes of me seemed too daunting. Labyrinth instead has been measured as an academic hinge in the framework. During my research process the essays of Jorge Luis Borges quickly came to mind. In this anthology I was flagged by the mention of Franz Kafka, my resource muse, and found this quote: “The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past” (201). In the short essay Borges examines pertinent points of departure in relation to the Czech storyteller, and he notes that all resemble Kafka but not necessarily each other (201). Thereby, the conversation between the influences did not exist until there was work to discuss. This notion sheds light on the laws of originality, and its contradictory nature. Although work may reflect a specific source, the history is multi-faceted.
Boyle, Shary. “Flesh and Blood” AGO, Toronto 2010.
In Virus (White Wedding), the figure below, Shary Boyle uses two of her strengths: sculpted figure and animated projection in combination to a mystifying effect. The classically rendered figure (with bat ears) extends a net, which captures the highly saturated chroma of light, in addition to our over-stimulated attention. When the lights switch off, we are left with the quiet simplicity of Boyle’s classic figure and a new appreciation for the pause between thoughts.
Boyle’s placement of classically rendered sculpture into contemporary installation initially stuck me as a kindred aesthetic. In place of sculpture, I re-contextualize canon literature into contemporary installation. But my first synchronic reaction to this particular work of Boyle’s was of a performance I did in Vlad Spicanovic’s 2008 course on contemporary collage methodologies. I had dressed entirely in white, behind a veil of translucent material that had projected onto it a visual reaction to collected sounds. It felt as though Boyle and I had tapped into a similar wavelength, which I intend to sample again in my thesis installation. I aim to fill my compositions on Mylar with projected light from painted paper lamp sources, at the centre of the narrative. Like Boyle’s bat blown around by a small fan, the idea of colour in motion also appeals to me.
Dery, Louise. David Altmejd: Metamorphosis (Montreal: Galerie de l’UQAM, 2007).
This artist book contains the largest collection of David Altmejd’s work to date, accompanied by curator, author, and teacher Louis Dery’s essay on the artist, which attempts to tackle an assessment of work in constant flux. She breaks down the essay into chapters revolving around ideas that arise when “modernist reserve and postmodernist eclecticism” are in conjunction (23). Dery sees Altmejd as “seeking to metabolize reality in a present swarming with vitality.” Altmejd disfigures the very subject that inspires him, yet in a direction that is more “towards life rather than death” (16), with crystal rather than rot. I am especially prone to align myself with this thinking: “There is a phenomenological dimension to this attitude, resting upon a desire to explore and understand the internal structure of the world while allowing it to impose itself or build itself on its own” (31), which to me signals the idea of an interpretive narrative where the architect of creative work learns from viewer interaction.
I believe that synchronicities can lead us in positive directions and the experience of reading this was full of strange parallels. Many of the themes that drive contemporary sculpture/installation artist David Altmejd also resonate strongly within my own practice. Although the cover doesn’t advertise it, the title of Louise Dery’s essay, Metamorphosis, which covers the spectrum of Altmejd’s decade in the art scene, startled me since my project relies so heavily on Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. Additionally, Labyrinth made its presence known as a chapter heading. Some days ago, I had been meditating on the re-emergence of the praying mantis in my life noticing it surface frequently in the Rorschach tests I conduct with classmates, when not but half an hour later I stumbled on Altmejd’s The Outside, the Inside, the Praying Mantis from 2005 (fig. 1 below). Dery’s essay has since proven to be one of the most informative and inspiring texts that I’ve read on any artist to date.
Gilmore, Graham. “Drop Dead Gorgeous” Mike Weiss Gallery, New York 2009.
Reference made by both Luke Painter and Laura Millard suggests a strong connection to my own work. Graham Gilmore’s stream of conscience application links words and phrases together as if inseparable by nature. By fragmenting words into outlined letters he both deconstructs and unites language, as a grain of sand to a beach. “The paintings both visibly and literally fracture the language of the text” (Weiss online). Gilmore re-contextualizes the contrasting sources of text by recombining the extracted letters onto clean white and off-white backgrounds, as I ascribe to bring a new framework to Phillips’s process; enlargement of the book format to life-size, and removal of the surrounding text works to create a space for me, away from both Gilmore and Phillips, while acknowledging their place in the conversion relevant to my practice.
Gysin, Brion “No Poets Don’t Own Words: For John Giorno” Recordings. 1960.
Along with his friend William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin was one of the first to make use of the cut-up technique. Gysin scrambled words until he found some kind of meaning, or the words took on meaning scrambled and the words scrambled meaning. My work embodies a facet of the cut-up technique, in that words are cut from their source and the source is cut from the words.
Hoffos, David. “Scenes from the House Dream” MOCCA, Toronto 2010.
Scenes from the House Dream is an immersive narrative to be experienced one realm at a time yet remembered as a whole. Each world he creates is a snapshot of a larger journey accessed by small portholes, and inside these painstakingly crafted dioramas, miniature reflections of life move about the scene. Eye Weekly describes the exhibit as “an environment that literalizes ways in which we’ve forgotten to look at paintings: as windows opening forwards and backwards, into the past and future, society and the self, the superego and id.” In one of Hoffos’ last rooms the viewer is transported by security camera into the actual diorama, appearing to stare back at their own self from the miniature sliding glass door. Hoffos speaks about his work in an online interview from View on Canadian Art: “I want the viewer in a position of dominance, where they can make the choice to be seduced by the illusion…the viewer is the ambulatory centre of the work… the viewer does complete the work that way. They provide the mind body centre of the experience.” Scenes from the House Dream brings spectacle back into our super-saturated world.
What I picture for my final installation is an immersive narrative where the viewer moves through the story, reading one frame at a time. Each piece stands alone, yet takes part as a point in the plot. Suspension of the pages from a wire creates a wall, a physical linear narrative that turns corners until reaching the illuminated centre of the room. At that point, the narrative reads backwards as the viewer circumnavigates, exiting the spiral. The way in which Hoffos perceives his work as incomplete without the viewers’ projection within the story and also the way he physically installs the work, in dark, sense-suspending rooms echoes my own voice; I coin this type of audience participation as an interpretive narrative.
Kafka, Franz. The Metamorphosis and Other Stories (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2003).
Known to the world as the story of a man turning into a giant beetle, The Metamorphosis regularly lends itself to psychoanalytic theory. Often defined by themes of castration, alienation and projection, Kafka’s world is one where nightmares become a reality, where self-conscious fears manifest into the physical. Like Escher’s drawings, Kafka employs circular logic. In his introduction to this compilation, short story writer Jason Baker observes that, “Rather than a linear argument, Kafka writes a spiral one… In striving to fit his impossible situations into the feeble vehicle of language, Kafka knowingly embarks on a failed enterprise. He attempts to express the inexpressible” (). And although some of his lesser-known texts are described as nonsensical, the mystery of the misunderstood opens up a great space for reader interjection and interpretation.
This text started a chain reaction in the basis of my thesis. Kafka’s enigmatic classic is the physical source from which my interpretive narrative is derived. There is room for self-projection in my abstraction of his work because of the conceptual nature of the inspiration. During the search for the ideal text to transform, it quickly became apparent that only The Metamorphosis would serve. I had previously read and studied the translated German novella in a literary criticism course and recalled the main character’s name. Gregor Samsa holds the word ego within it and so my protagonist was born. And guided by the psychoanalytic content, my Kafkaesque poetry fit comfortably into Rorschach inspired inkblots. The first person perspective and introspective nature of Kafka’s work lends itself to a framework of human tribulation that I construct in my thesis.
Musical Box, The. “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway Tour” Massey Hall, Toronto 2006.
Of any concert I’ve seen or heard of, this one merits the title of Gesamkunstwerk. A total work of art, the early Peter Gabriel era recreation band The Musical Box employs delicately handled, dynamic musical scores, installation, performance, costume, theatricality, video, lighting, and visual resonance. With a bank of endlessly vivid slide projections, on loan from the original group, never is there monotony or predictability in the visual. The obscure imagery of the slides demands the attention of even the subconscious, yet their origins remain a mystery.
Peter Gabriel has been a beacon of creative force in my life. Without his artistic and maverick sense of theatre, none of the displayed images would be anything more than five men and their instruments on stage. When I first saw the Slipperman costume (fig. 3 below), it inspired me to build a bulbous lamp out of gel transfers. And the illuminated, spinning, tepee structure is always in the back of my mind as a source of inspiration. The backlit construction holds weight within my presentation aesthetic.
Nadel, Barbara. Deadly Web (London: Headline Book Publishing Ltd, 2005).
This piece of found pulp fiction was literally trash that served as test run for Tom Phillips’s cut-up, plunder technique (described below). The challenge of using an uncelebrated text to create poetry prepared me to work with the stripped down vernacular of translated Kafka, which proved to be more demanding than the overly written pulp. In working with this text, I concluded that pen would no longer be used because of its resistance to editing. Hence this source helped narrow the investigation of media, for selection of words and phrases, to graphite. I also determined that what I achieved with Deadly Web was merely disparate, staccato poetry that would be more successful with the embodiment of a coherent narrative.
Northern Lights, The. Childhood Memory. Bancroft Ontario, 1992.
On close examination of my influences, one might notice the reoccurrence of dimly lit installations that thrive on meandering sources of chromatic light. Within my creative writing and visual presentation there is, by and large, a preoccupation with the behaviour of light. In psychology there is a belief that what we experience from infancy to early childhood (up to four years old) has a monumental effect on our constructed self. Before my parents divorced, when I was just three years old I sat on my father’s shoulders and watched the majesty of these paranormal ribbons of light in silent awe, with our family in Bancroft. I can never underestimate the impact of this experience, especially when it comes to my visual practice.
Phillips, Tom. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (New York: Thames and Hudson Inc., 1982).
With a degree from Oxford and Camberwell School of Art, London born Tom Phillips is on the 4th edition of his ever expanding A Humament, currently pushing 400 pages. Using a variant of Gysin’s cut-up technique, Phillips’s predetermined set of rules follow: the first piece of competent literature he came across for threepence would suit the challenge, no content would be added to the text extraneously and the main character Bill Toge would emerge only on pages where the words together or altogether appeared. The book demonstrates structuralism in its form as a deconstructive collaboration with an author 75 years his senior. He sets out to prove that there is no sentiment that cannot be expressed within the pages of his source A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, published in 1892.
The generational collaboration exemplified in Phillips’s work is mirrored in my own collaboration with Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, written in 1915. I preserve Phillips’s prohibition of outside material yet ignore the strict rule for Toge, including my character Ego, exhumed from Gregor, whenever it suits the narrative. The plunder piece, A Humament is crucial stylistic inspiration for what I do. In my work I use Phillips’s winding river forms to connect words and phrases as a point of departure, and owe a huge amount to his aesthetic, which marries poetry to drawing and painting.
Pien, Ed. “Haven of Delight” Museum London, Ontario 2010.
After hearing of my ideas for thesis, curator Camilla Singh (MOCCA), was reminded of Ed Pien’s show Gathering Shades at MOCCA in 2001. In my manner of research, which begins foremost by looking at the work, I found Haven of Delight, a recent exhibit that deals with the fragility of immersive installation. I relate stylistically to Pien’s preoccupation with silhouette and illumination. Like Pien, my process involves improvising with a projected source image, making selective formal choices in the way that Pien makes his cuts. My vision for the grad show is to have my narrative installed in a way that can be read backward and forward, with multiple perspectives looking in on the same event. His labyrinthine installation is a glimpse at the cyclical dream, no beginning, no end.
Thériault, Michèle. 3 PAINTINGS, 1 SCULPTURE, 3 SPACES: Claude Tousignant, “Black Grey White” (Montreal: Galerie Léonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery, Concordia University, 2005).
This essay by Michèle Thériault is a critical assessment of Claude Tousignant’s exhibition Black Grey White, which examines notions of the white cube. The essay and the work serve as a critique of the institutionalised gallery setting, putting into question the relationship between artist and venue. Tousignant creates immense block canvases that are displayed off the wall. The depth of frame allows the pieces to balance on the floor, which enables the artist as architect in the gallery setting to reconfigure the space. The paintings migrate around the white cube to function as newly constructed walls of monochrome black, grey and white. This publication gave me insight to construct physical hallways of narrative with my work, adaptable to any room provided when suspended from taut wire.
Wilson, Stewart. PhD. Personal Interview. 124 Crawford Street, Toronto, November 2010.
As a working psychologist one of Dr. Wilson’s positions included assessing potential staff at the Winnipeg penitentiary and conducting Rorschach tests with the inmates up for parole evaluation. He recalls that a restrained or refused reading of the inkblots suggests serious trauma, rigidity in the personality and a highly guarded individual. Withholding interpretation or responding instead to the negative white space in the blots is a way of constructing the self in an inauthentic light. Abundance of imagery and high detail in a response signifies intellect. He infers that “it’s not what they see but why they see it” when it comes to diagnosis. He revealed that using colour as a clue to what has been collectively discovered could give insight into my work. Often colour readings are projected onto achromatic cards and saturation of colour in a response has to do with levels of emotionality. Based on this, I decided upon a survey of the class in relation to my inkblots, to determine if there were dominant hues already imbued in our shared reaction. Regular interviews with the psychologist will prove to be an invaluable resource.
