Artmaking, Subjectivity, and Signification

As art education professors, art teachers, and students, we do not know enough about how meaning is produced through artmaking. Often, artists themselves cannot give articulated or nuanced accounts of their signifying practices. Drawing upon Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the present article wrestles with this issue in an investigation of artmaking as a consequence of both conscious and unconscious thought processes. Scholar Shoshana Felman (1993) similarly theorizes literary practices of writing and reading as a deadly struggle between conscious and unconscious knowledge, and the following discussion focuses on this struggle. The discussion also Incorporates related findings from neuroscience brain research into Insight and problem solving to amplify and support this position. While the two theoretical discourses - psychoanalytic theory and cognitive neuroscience - derive from very dissimilar perspectives and aims, they share a common regard for thought processes other than deliberate mindfulness.The article begins with an account of installation artist Ann Hamilton's artistic practice as a demonstration of how artmaking operates at both conscious and unconscious levels. Following this presentation, the article examines Lacan's conception of unconscious knowledge followed by scholars Dany Nobus and Malcolm Quinn's (2005) theorizing of Lacanian psychoanalytic practice as a failure of conscious knowledge. The implications of Lacanian clinical practice, as Nobus and Quinn explicate, purposively invoke unconscious subjective truth, a clinical strategy that has Implications for artistic practice as a similarly contested site characterized by tensions between conscious and unconscious knowledge. A brief account of current brain research and insight follows with findings that offer interesting neuroscientific parallels to psychoanalytic concepts of conscious and unconscious thought processes. Subsequently, the article looks at painters Jasper Johns and Elizabeth Murray and sculptor, video, and performance artist Oliver Herring to further exemplify the relevance of these different modes of thinking for artistic practice. In the latter section of the article, a description of a recent graduate art education course, "Image Makers or Meaning Makers," addresses the pedagogical implications of the previous investigation of psychoanalytic theory, neuroscience brain research, and contemporary artistic practice.1Installation Artist Ann HamiltonAlthough discursive and symbolic knowledge figure prominently in Ann Hamilton's practice, she consistently undercuts language to evacuate a space for non-discursive ways of knowing. Critic Joan Simon (2002) recounts that in Hamilton's MFA installation, the space between memory (1985), "language became a palpable material" (p.44). For this work, Hamilton instructed a fellow graduate student to enunciate a Swedish text. It was not, however, the content of the text that mattered most viewers would have found It incomprehensible - but rather, the rhythm of the reader's enunciations that became of consequence.Frequently, Hamilton's installations include language transformed in ways that frustrate comprehension such as barely audible whispering, garbled speech or, as in mantle (1998), radio receivers picking up overlapping voices, static, and Morse code. Such actions emphasize the materiality of language as do the attendants in Hamilton's installations systematically, line-byline, erasing, cutting, or burning printed text. In conversation with museum studies professor Mary Coffey (2001), Hamilton articulates the function of language in her practice. She remarks,A lot of people have asked me if I am trying to make a prellnguistic sort of work by erasing text. I don't think I'm doing that at all. I'm very Interested in the hierarchies of our habits of perception, and how, if something can be contained within the discursive structure of words, that we trust it will have more legitimacy than other kinds of information or ways of knowing. …