“This business of the repetitive, how does it come about?” He does not choose to be Himself but rather finds Himself in experience. Being this ‘Artist’ is a curious thing. It may be not that He MUST be the Artist, but that the ‘art’ channels His repetitive need. He MUST repeat. Repeating is a return. This mounting pile of bird work is a continuous loop whose ostensible subject-matter enables Him to acceptably satisfy the repetitive need. Allied to a degree of competence, it disguises and reveals something pathological. This drawing is not an image or a representation. Its making created something real. Lacan wrote that the real is ” ..that which always returns to the same place.” “Don’t try to be clever!”, ‘It’ snaps. I watch his reaction. Like the beachcomber He comes across things that look interesting, useful. Bits of Lacan, bits of Steiner, bits of string, bits of thinking, detached pieces of larger worlds that bob up uncontrollably, glinting, to the surface. Bits of things are interesting in their own right. He does what He can. Moments of ‘Yes, I understand.’, are just that, moments. And then He returns to a time before He understood, to repeat the process. That is where He lives, in that space. The mounting pile may one day amount to something that makes sense, if bits of this and that find that their shapes fit. The shaded boundary of the bird, merging with the background, the not quite formed feathers create through the repetitive actions of their making, something that cannot be completed, that is ‘almost’ and which colludes with need to create desire.
“Do you believe all that stuff?” ‘It’ slapped him awake. “Don’t you think it might all be rather silly, unreal?”
