David John
I’m a retired psychoanalyst and a concert pianist who plays classical concerts in non standard venues.
I play music, run a performing band project for people suffering enduring mental health problems, and I reflect on things from a psychoanalytic perspective.
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Patrick Hughes - The Illusionist is Present.
Eliot spoke of a condition of Being where it is possible to have an experience, but to 'miss the meaning'. "We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form." The Dry Salvages from The Four Quartets. When it comes to experiencing and appreciating Art, I have a natural tendency to simply experience the Truth of its Beauty, to paraphrase Keats. But in the case of Patrick Hughes's work, and exposure to his studio and gallery, I am indulging myself through reflecting on my experience and making links with psychoanalysis, and this is mainly done in an attempt to explain the emotional reactions to witnessing his personality, his character and his work. I also have two other of associations, and I will begin with those.
I went to a Vermeer exhibition. Immediately I was pleased to see, in the flesh, the small painting of a woman playing the guitar. The light shone from the painting and especially lit were the pearls around her neck. On close inspection, it was possible to see the brushmarks of the paint that has been used to create the illusion of light from the necklace and a certain pleasure was taken in observing how he had 'pulled it off', how he had pulled the illusion of a pearl necklace out of the hat, out of the surface of the canvas. It put me in mind of the nature of illusion in narrative artwork. How paint on a 2-D surface is able to render in the imagination pictures of the real 3-D objects.
At the beginning of Phillip Glass's opera Einstein on the beach, we hear singers intone the number of beats they are singing per section, per bar, it goes 1234, 123456, 123456**, over a basic chord structure of Tonic, Subdominant and Dominant. And it repeats. We get the message - Glass is showing us the 'work of the music' whilst we are simultaneously experiencing it.
Hughes renders the idea of illusion completely. His play with perspective is graphically discoverable through seeing the method that creates it, through the use of three-dimensional canvases, or shaped blocks, or metal cubes hollowed out and the insides painted and mounted on a canvas. It's like a magician performing an illusion, a magic trick, but who is, at the same time showing you exactly how he does it. If there were a Magic Circle for artists Hughes would be drummed out of it for giving away trade secrets.A tour of the studio was a little like being shown around the chocolate factory by Willy Wonka himself, the golden ticket being discrete access and time to chat to the Magus.
Most striking are the feelings of joy and pleasure that one takes in meeting a colourful, slightly eccentric ( in the best way) man, and in observing and experiencing his work.
His work is not a stand and stare in contemplation thing, it's best, if recording it, to involve time, and video whilst walking past is the best method. It is a moving through space and time and a taking pleasure in the changing parallax of landscape like one would walking through any beautiful cityscape or piece of the natural world.
In the work of Donald Winnicott, psychoanalyst and paediatrician, we find an important emphasis on illusion. He suggests that the infant, in its state of undeveloped 'primaryness' doesn't so much experience the breast as something external to itself, (he would need an Ego to do that, and, unlike Freud and Klein, Winnicott suggests there isn't one) but as he is experiencing the breast, being presented at the right moment, he is having the illusion that he hasn't found the breast but has created it out of his primitive imagination. Winnicott saw this as an important and necessary illusion in the establishing of good mental health. The infant creates the breast, but it just so happens that mother, in her state of primary maternal preoccupation, is attuned to presenting it just when he's ready to create. The illusion that the infant has created the world is allowed for, the infant is allowed to live in a world of illusion and good parents indulge the infant's need for it. Winnicott describes how gradually, over time, as the infant develops its faculties, it is able to move from a world of illusion to a world of reality-based awareness through a gradual procedure or disillusionment. It remains, though that the world of illusion is always there for us as a source of great pleasure and satisfaction and reassurance. Resulting in a feeling of harmony with the world and a capacity to be at peace and at rest and to sleep therefore and to dream, about mother, and thus internalise the experience of the breast.
The function of the mother in this area has been described by Christopher Bollas as the Transformational Object, (The transformational objectBOLLAS, C. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis; London Vol. 60, (Jan 1, 1979): 97. Developmentally it precedes the well-known transitional object in the form of teddy bears etc, and is really a process of transformation that is affected upon the individual without the individual knowing that it's happening and forms part of his ideas of The Unthought Known, described by Klein as "Memories in Feeling". So a baby that is cold, wet hungry and miserable or anxious has an experience of being fed, changed, held and restored to equanimity. This maternal function is a process that transforms the state of the infant from a state of anxiety to a state of well-being. Bollas contends that we seek the transformational power of this object throughout our lives and we subliminally look for it especially in the world of the arts. We might say that it is this transformational function that makes the arts so important to us all.
The playfulness the pleasure, the illusion present in Hughes work connects directly, but unconsciously, to this Procedure. I'm also put in mind of Winnicotts work on play, which he describes as deadly serious. There is a seriousness and a sincerity in Hughes's work, but without it being sombre and there is a tender and very human invitation to play, as with a generous and warm hearted uncle might engage children in play, but at the same time knowing the health involved in play, and he knows exactly what he's doing, but without letting the consciousness of the value of play detract from the play itself.
And that brings us to the essential feature of play as Winniicott stated it, which is that it involves a paradox - a word very much associated with Hughes. If a child is playing with a box and pretending it's a tank, to the child it is both box and tank, and the child must never be asked the question 'is that a box or a tank?' because of course it's both simultaneously. The paradox must never be resolved. This is the area of the transitional space a place between worlds where children play. It is the beach of the psyche between the land of the 'thing in itself' real and the waters of the unconscious. It is healthy psychologically to be neither landlocked or at sea. Incidentally Bollas introduces the concept of the Normotic, where people can be hyper-normal when they really shouldn't be given what might have happened to them in early life. Correspondingly it is possible to be completely at sea, lost to the waters and the impulses of the unconscious - in this area we would have psychosis, but in Winnicott's play space the imagination is alive and free and we can move between these two abysses. In order to maintain a healthy mind, we have to be able to do something with the crazy mess of our unconscious, if we are talking to a friend, we need to be able to do something internally where we don't allow stimulus of talking to a friend in all of its instinctual content to disturb the experience of actually having a conversation, so a kind of contact barrier is needed between the primary processes of the unconscious, and the necessary reality determined by the secondary processes of using verbal language in a conversation. (See Freud The Interpretation of Dreams chapter 7)
The value of Hughes's work is that it sits in the 'space between worlds' as does all good art, but more, it links us to the Transformational power of Illusion. It reminds us of the good experiences of illusion that we were hopefully indulged in by our parents, when we were tiny before memory, and later it reminds us how we were invited to play in a world where things are boxes and tanks simultaneously.
There is joy to be found in the experience of Hughe's work, and I'm left thinking that if there is such a thing as Art in the Service of Human Wellbeing, than this surely must be it.
At the beginning of Phillip Glass's opera Einstein on the beach, we hear singers intone the number of beats they are singing per section, per bar, it goes 1234, 123456, 123456**, over a basic chord structure of Tonic, Subdominant and Dominant. And it repeats. We get the message - Glass is showing us the 'work of the music' whilst we are simultaneously experiencing it.
Hughes renders the idea of illusion completely. His play with perspective is graphically discoverable through seeing the method that creates it, through the use of three-dimensional canvases, or shaped blocks, or metal cubes hollowed out and the insides painted and mounted on a canvas. It's like a magician performing an illusion, a magic trick, but who is, at the same time showing you exactly how he does it. If there were a Magic Circle for artists Hughes would be drummed out of it for giving away trade secrets.A tour of the studio was a little like being shown around the chocolate factory by Willy Wonka himself, the golden ticket being discrete access and time to chat to the Magus.
Most striking are the feelings of joy and pleasure that one takes in meeting a colourful, slightly eccentric ( in the best way) man, and in observing and experiencing his work.
His work is not a stand and stare in contemplation thing, it's best, if recording it, to involve time, and video whilst walking past is the best method. It is a moving through space and time and a taking pleasure in the changing parallax of landscape like one would walking through any beautiful cityscape or piece of the natural world.
In the work of Donald Winnicott, psychoanalyst and paediatrician, we find an important emphasis on illusion. He suggests that the infant, in its state of undeveloped 'primaryness' doesn't so much experience the breast as something external to itself, (he would need an Ego to do that, and, unlike Freud and Klein, Winnicott suggests there isn't one) but as he is experiencing the breast, being presented at the right moment, he is having the illusion that he hasn't found the breast but has created it out of his primitive imagination. Winnicott saw this as an important and necessary illusion in the establishing of good mental health. The infant creates the breast, but it just so happens that mother, in her state of primary maternal preoccupation, is attuned to presenting it just when he's ready to create. The illusion that the infant has created the world is allowed for, the infant is allowed to live in a world of illusion and good parents indulge the infant's need for it. Winnicott describes how gradually, over time, as the infant develops its faculties, it is able to move from a world of illusion to a world of reality-based awareness through a gradual procedure or disillusionment. It remains, though that the world of illusion is always there for us as a source of great pleasure and satisfaction and reassurance. Resulting in a feeling of harmony with the world and a capacity to be at peace and at rest and to sleep therefore and to dream, about mother, and thus internalise the experience of the breast.
The function of the mother in this area has been described by Christopher Bollas as the Transformational Object, (The transformational objectBOLLAS, C. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis; London Vol. 60, (Jan 1, 1979): 97. Developmentally it precedes the well-known transitional object in the form of teddy bears etc, and is really a process of transformation that is affected upon the individual without the individual knowing that it's happening and forms part of his ideas of The Unthought Known, described by Klein as "Memories in Feeling". So a baby that is cold, wet hungry and miserable or anxious has an experience of being fed, changed, held and restored to equanimity. This maternal function is a process that transforms the state of the infant from a state of anxiety to a state of well-being. Bollas contends that we seek the transformational power of this object throughout our lives and we subliminally look for it especially in the world of the arts. We might say that it is this transformational function that makes the arts so important to us all.
The playfulness the pleasure, the illusion present in Hughes work connects directly, but unconsciously, to this Procedure. I'm also put in mind of Winnicotts work on play, which he describes as deadly serious. There is a seriousness and a sincerity in Hughes's work, but without it being sombre and there is a tender and very human invitation to play, as with a generous and warm hearted uncle might engage children in play, but at the same time knowing the health involved in play, and he knows exactly what he's doing, but without letting the consciousness of the value of play detract from the play itself.
And that brings us to the essential feature of play as Winniicott stated it, which is that it involves a paradox - a word very much associated with Hughes. If a child is playing with a box and pretending it's a tank, to the child it is both box and tank, and the child must never be asked the question 'is that a box or a tank?' because of course it's both simultaneously. The paradox must never be resolved. This is the area of the transitional space a place between worlds where children play. It is the beach of the psyche between the land of the 'thing in itself' real and the waters of the unconscious. It is healthy psychologically to be neither landlocked or at sea. Incidentally Bollas introduces the concept of the Normotic, where people can be hyper-normal when they really shouldn't be given what might have happened to them in early life. Correspondingly it is possible to be completely at sea, lost to the waters and the impulses of the unconscious - in this area we would have psychosis, but in Winnicott's play space the imagination is alive and free and we can move between these two abysses. In order to maintain a healthy mind, we have to be able to do something with the crazy mess of our unconscious, if we are talking to a friend, we need to be able to do something internally where we don't allow stimulus of talking to a friend in all of its instinctual content to disturb the experience of actually having a conversation, so a kind of contact barrier is needed between the primary processes of the unconscious, and the necessary reality determined by the secondary processes of using verbal language in a conversation. (See Freud The Interpretation of Dreams chapter 7)
The value of Hughes's work is that it sits in the 'space between worlds' as does all good art, but more, it links us to the Transformational power of Illusion. It reminds us of the good experiences of illusion that we were hopefully indulged in by our parents, when we were tiny before memory, and later it reminds us how we were invited to play in a world where things are boxes and tanks simultaneously.
There is joy to be found in the experience of Hughe's work, and I'm left thinking that if there is such a thing as Art in the Service of Human Wellbeing, than this surely must be it.