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Untitled.
Halla Beloff
Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh
BPS Conference Symposium. 14 December l993.
In l908 he published a paper, 'Passion erotique des etoffes chez la femme'. Whether it was chez la femme or chez de Clerambault we will have to discuss further.
In l9l5 and l917 he convalesces in Morocco after severe wounds suffered while fighting in the French Army. There he continued his studies on "drape" and photographs draped (veiled) Moroccan women. Perhaps 30,000 photographs taken between l9l4 and l9l8.
He teaches on the Art of Draped Costumes at theEcoles des Beaux Arts in Paris.
As a Forensic Psychiatrist he asks to be brought in on all cases of women who are charged with shop-lifting cloth from Paris shops. [Source: Dr Serge Tisseron, the Lacanian psycho-analyst, Edinburgh August l992]
On l6 November l934, after two unsuccessful operations for cataracts, seated with his camera focused on the mirror in front of him, he shoots himself with his officer's revolver.
The glass negatives of the veiled women mouldered in card-board boxes in the cellars of the Musee d'Homme until the l980s.
I am, I would have to say: 'fascinated by de Clerambault's photographic oeuvre', seeing it as 'an erotic daydream carried out in reality'; and seeing him here in 'inexorable pursuit of an erotic script'. (I show here my use of the concepts of the eminent Parisian psychoanalyst Joyce MacDougall.)
Sometimes it is useful to start naively, and I have done that playing the role of social psychologist.
The human body is the ultimate mundane object. We all have one. There it is.
As John Updike has written even of the feminine:
"The female body is, in its ability to conceive and carry a fetus and to nurse an infant, our life's vehicle - it is the engine and the tracks."[Odd Jobs Andre Deutsch l992 chap: The Female Body p 7l]
In western societies in judeo-christian societies the body is not primarily a machine for living in but a sex object. With sexuality, it has become a secret object. Because it is the object of temptation. But that is just stating the matter in other words.
How and why did it work out that way? To be become a secret subject?
Theologians have their own arguments and justifications for that position. The modern position is, I think: That is how civilisation comes. Freud, if we follow his thinking in Civilisation and its Discontents suggests that in becoming human persons we had to curb our impulses. What is constrained receives a critical power. What has power to attract must be hidden. Which increases its power...
Then vicissitudes of development lead both to the sublime - sublimation - which is the basis of all art and science, philosophy and ideology and to dead-ends of development which are called 'perversions'.
It is 'cultural deprivation' the inhibition of instinct, the diversion of life's natural object - which is, of course, to experience intense pleasure ... that is both the cause and the result of civilisation. Civilisation means also though that we express ourselves in the creation of order and beauty.
Mixed in with civilisation is still the point that: One of the things that secure protection against suffering is to become independent of the external world, by looking for happiness in the inner things of the mind. To displace libido. The furthest region of this is, life of illusion in phantasy. At the centre though is the creation and enjoyment of art.
Freud says that he cannot rate high enough Art as a source of happiness and consolation in life. "The enjoyment of beauty produces a particular, mildly intoxicating kind of sensation."
Clerambault's illusion and consolation are here before us.
Freud, remember, saw beauty as vital to mental life itself, with some paradox...
"There is no very evident use in beauty; the necessity of it for cultural purposes is not apparent, and yet civilisation could not do without it."
Where is its source?
"Its derivation from the realms of sexual sensation is all that seems certain; the love of beauty is a perfect example of a feeling with an inhibited aim."
"Beauty and attraction are first of all the attributes of a sexual object."
Are all objects of beauty, then sexual objects?
Freud himself said that we expect people of civilisation to revere and create beauty. This would come through varying degrees of sublimation, through varying "maiming wounds" not least the incest taboo, the curbing of the sexuality of children and the narrowing of object choice so that extra-genital forms of satisfaction are called perverse.
What is sublime then, and what is a forbidden substitute, is sometimes the subject of fine dissection.
Let us get this clear, Clerambault created visions of women. He looked at them. He is a voyeur in that sense. He had a legal right to look - that far. Hence he does not fall into the psychiatric category of 'peeper'. And yet he captured them, akin to a 'peeper', 'behaving in presumed privacy' because they were Other to him as well as because they were Veiled ... He caught them in an authentic, not a contrived mode. Clerambault found a fascination in cloth and the folds of cloth (what he thought about the body underneath, I don't know, nor of the spirit of the women inside.)
He has opened up a particular genre of fascination which I had not seen or thought about before.
What his photographs show is a Theatre of the Mind. 'The neo-sexual Theatre of His Mind'. Joyce MacDougall again. In Winnicott's terms - we see the 'Transitional Space between reality and fantasy'.
And it is of fascination because his imagination was removed not only from the dreary and terrible world of commercial pornography where the male voyeurism, hostility, envy is displayed with the reciprocal false consciousness about female masochism, exhibitionism, hypocrisy but also removed from the consistent history of western Fine Art where the male body and the male spirit must be shown in the metaphors of power and action in opposition to (what we here appropriately call) the opposite sex's soft passivity and ingratiating receptivity.
I spend time studying Interpretive Repertoires when I examine texts, verbal or visual; that is, the limited range of 'terms' used in particular stylistic and grammatical constructions. I want to find the purpose and the consequences of such Interpretive Repertoires.
And I'm eager to study and interpret contradictions. (Freud would have called them denials, rationalisations, any ways in which a thing repressed, returns.)
Others: Modern artists especially use limited Repertoires, which become their trade-marks. (And confirm the modern art work as a consumer product.) Think of Alan Jones' high heels, Francis Bacon's squashed faces, Helmut Newton's oiled and tanned skins and Robert Mapplethorpe's sex objects, whether they were black young men or black bunches of grapes. Clerambault's Repertoire is, of course, that of Going into Foreign Lands i.e. Orientalism.
NB Edward Said (quoted in Time magazine) here ... Representation - is about how we see other cultures and depict them - in our own - through imagination and stereotype...
By l915 this already had a long tradition. The Orient as equivalent to Sexual Desire. The Odalisque. Delacroix, Ingres, Renoir, Matisse to the Harem Girls of Lord Leighton, Alma-Tadema and Russell Flint. And in l910 he would have been exposed to the pseudo-oriental extraveganza of the Diaghileff-Bakst Sheherezade Indeed a 'flaming' Representation of the Other. (Michael Moon) Which has never disappeared and returned just a year ago with Liberty & Co's Art Collection of Varuna Wool fabric... That one does not necessarily have only that stancewith respect to The Other is nicely shown in the work of the Scottish photographer Owen Logan who has more recently been working in Morocco.
Owen Logan. Mathematics Teacher and Companion. Fête du Trone. Essaouria.
The most powerful Clerambault images have an abstract quality, although I can also see them as Archaic sleepwalkers. (And one could place them with the embodiment of psychic spirits which were 'photographed'.)
Clerambault's 'obsession' and I use this not at all as a pejorative term, enabled him to become highly skilled at stage-managing set-ups for his own 'intense pleasure'. It must have been that, otherwise why make pictures of cloth parcels? And so many of them.
For the sitter, our thoughts must be even more speculative, but they must have found some reward in the experience. Even if they were sex workers, the work they did for him for these sittings, cannot be considered arduous or intrusive.
He looked at them but they looked at him too.
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I like to think one could apply Irving Penn's comment on his work in l949 Morocco with other wrapped women:
"We invited these mysterious Guedra women to pose for us.... They sat waiting in a group outside our tent. Those chosen sat eyes fixed on the lens, enjoying the camera's scrutiny yet themselves impenetrable ... The time I took with them ... gave dignity to their calling in the eyes of the townspeople who passed by ... What is revealed is no more than these mysterious women wanted us to know."
And for us or at least for me, they are images / figures of mystery and power. (I can't distinguish the image from the figure.) It is because the woman is withdrawn and yet holding us in a serious and sometimes seeming-baselisk gaze.
They are magnetic and yet not through any ordinary 'attractive' quality. They do not conform to any ephemeral measure of voluptuousness or boyish flatness. Their gaze does not invite. They have dominion over their body and their soul., at least in relation to Clerambault. The world of drapery and mystery is of their culture and within it they have an autonomy that western women have sometimes envied. A social psychologist paying serious attention to these images, is struck by the simplicity, elegance, single-minded consistency of these technically 'sublime' products of Clerambault's imagination.
Clerambault restricted himself austerely and perfected 'his' image, and surely also the experience of making it. To the specific 'information' that gave him indirect, sublimated happiness.
Is that disturbing? I don't find it so. He had the camera; the women had the power to arouse him - aesthetically too. He created beauty. He gives me beauty too. Those are two civilised activities.
There is the male look and the female being looked at at the extreme remove from nudity and from malicious exploitation.
That fabric, and the draping of fabric, can be seen as technically in this case in the domain of fetish is the affair of Clerambault - none of mine.
The aesthetic and the psychological intrigue - the contradiction of the the interest in the women's form but the denial of their bodily selves - is in the public domain and is enormously elegant in its very single-mindedness and austerity.
Like all the best intellectual products, it is rich in many meanings, here and today: ethnographic, historical, aesthetic, psychological and personal.
And we can make many interpretations of those meanings.
But I want to end with a discovery that I made while reading for this symposium: Freud wrote about the invention of the Camera. Anticipating many later definers of its power ... Enumerating the material benefits of Man's (sic) advance, he wrote:
"... with the photographic camera he has created an instrument which registers transitory visual impressions, ... [it is] at bottom [a] materialisation of his own power of memory."
It seems good to me that we have today
the materialisation of Clerambault's memory.
Dian Arbus
Millerton, NY, Aperture Press, l972.
Gaetan Gatian de Clerambault: psychiatre et photographe
sous ladirection de Serge Tisseron. Paris Les Emphecheurs de Penser en Rond nd.
Freud, Sigmund
Civilisation and its Discontents
London, HogarthPress, l930.
Logan, Owen
Al Maghrib: Photographs from Morocco
Edinburgh,Polygon, l988.
MacDougall, Joyce
Theatres of the Mind: Illusion and Truth on thePsychoanalytic Stage
London, Free Association Books, 1986.
Mapplethorpe, Robert
Robert Mapplethorpe l970 - l983
London, Institute of Contemporary Arts, l983.
Newton, Helmut in
Nude :Theory
New York, Lustrum, l979.
Penn, Irving
Worlds in a Small Room
London, Secker and Warburg, l974.
