THE DIALECTICS OF DESIRE IN THE THEATRE OF THE DREAMS:

TWO RECENT WORKS BY EWEN COATES.

by Alice Eye

I always aim at true subjects, but I have to be content with shadows
(Jacques Lacan, 1954-55; 244).

Sculpture is famously that which we trip over when walking backwards to better view a painting. The brief of this essay was to offer a critique of the sculptural work which Ewen Coates has brought to 'trip us up' in the current exhibition, work produced in the third dimension despite his continued insistence that he is 'really' a painter.

Speaking about art is problematic enough, but speaking about sculpture brings a particular difficulty. The essential fact that the object exists in a phenomenal world, in time and space disconfirms the notion that its mute 'objectness' has a correlate in language. Sculpture, we might assume, is no more arbitrary in its articulation of form than the written word is in relation to speech. The question remains, however, how can form, which is mute, speak to we who act as its witness?

T.S. Eliot, in his 1925 poem The Hollow Men , describes how we are forever doomed to communicate with shadows.

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the shadow

In viewing this recent work, it seems that Coates has not so much created something to fall over, as something to fall into . Like Alice through the looking glass, it is in the exploration of the shadow world that is subtle, playful, ambiguous and mutable. Rather than attempting to construct a narrative in linear time, the artist re-presents fleeting images from his own unconscious, images which speak more about the heart than the intellect. In this sense, the pieces before us may illustrate what Dor refers to in his description of dream images as metanomic objects . Coates' unfashionable insistence on the possibility of originality is based on this notion that the work of art, like the dream, is a fiction constructed by a unique aesthetic through the dialectics of desire.

Freud theorised that every dream contained a hidden wish. For Christopher Bollas, the dream is an 'intrasubjective rendezvous' where elements within the dream are carefully arranged by the subjects to play out the objects of memory and desire in the theatre of the dream. From this point of view, the dream is the object of the unconscious ego's articulation of memory and desire. More specifically, Bollas regards the dream as . the transformation of the subject into his thought, specifically, the placing of the self into an allegory of desire and dread that is fashioned by the ego. Dread because, according to the Lacanian view, all desire is structured around lack (frustration, privation and castration).

The task of the mirror stage is to enter the symbolic register and escape the psychotic resonance of the imaginary. In Coates' large 'portal' work, wrong house, the fragmentary nature of subjectivity is evoked in opposition to illusory notions of a unitary 'I'. A spare aluminium frame, about the size and shape of a doorway, creates a 'hole' in space. On either side of the frame two cast aluminium mops are propped against each other, their handles meeting in the centre of the frame. This freestanding doorway/mirror in landscape creates a gestalt imbalance, with alternate readings available depending on whether we read the internal space as a reflective plane or a linear division of actual space. To this ambiguous spatial configuration is added the paradoxical contradiction inherent in the transformation of the soft form of the mop into the rigidity of metal. Coates' use of the ordinary is reminiscent of the tutu against the bronze body of Degas' Dancer.

In the second work, C3(see three), Coates has constructed a table in the form of an equilateral triangle. The title refers playfully to the systems of classification used in the naming of inventions ( Harrison 's clocks were called H1 - H4) and infers identification with a process which draws from 17 th Century physics. In terms of its scale, height, weight, presence and energy, the table appears to exist in the real world as other than 'just' a thought. The surface order implied by the strategic repetition of transformed 'ordinary' objects - in this case lawn bowls - evokes the fiction of a Newtonian 'field of dreams', a kind of magnetic forcefield designed to reflect the intelligence of the physical universe. Here, however, the difficulty of 'counting to three' is played out in the presence of an architectonic conductor/monitor reminiscent of a Mayan automation in charge of an aberrant atomic clock. The presence of this solar aspect of 'the-name-of-the-father' invites an order but the order breaks down at the moment of definition. In functional terms, Coates has described C3 as a failure, the balls 'just don't stay in line'.

In C3, life expectancy becomes a kind of postponement, a waiting for life to begin, a stagnation. C4, which has not yet been made, is the hope of the future. The Oedipal configuration insists that desire remains forever unsatisfied because it has to become language. Language which, through the process defined by Lacan as the mirror stage , confers the status of desiring subject upon the child, brings with it the paradoxical impossibility of communication, for as soon as the 'speakingbeing' becomes a desiring subject, his desire is taken captive by language and its original nature is lost.

Henceforth, the other is, in effect, always situated on the other side of what Lacan has termed the wall of language . The question remains, how can any action remain authentic, when it can only ever be represented in symbolic form (as a shadow of the original phenomena)? By approaching Coates' work as a dream text, we obviate the pretence that direct communication between subjects was ever a possibility. All we can hope to do, as viewers, is to catch hold of the coat tails of the chains of signification as they occur in the presence of the work. For each new viewer, the specificity of its meaning will forever slip away.

Eliot, T.S. 1925/1961, Selected poems

Dor, J.1998, and Introduction to the reading of Lacan: The unconscious structured like a language.

Bollas, C.1987, and the shadow of the object: Psychoanalysis of the untaught known.

Lancan, J. 1957-1958, Seminar of January 15, 1958.

Ibid