Look what the cat dragged in, 2023, Silicone, Aluminium, Hair, 37 x 50 x 52 cm (left) - 38 x 32 x 65 cm (right)

Look what the cat dragged in a possible approach:

Heidegger posits the vase as a special kind of object. Its creation adds something to the world but at the same time it introduces an absence; or as Lacan writes in his seminar The Ethics of Psycoanalysis: “It creates the void and thereby introduces the possibility of filling it” (1) , or in more light-hearted terms: “Everyone makes jokes about macaroni, because it is a hole with something around it” (2). It is this dialectic of something and nothing that many (Sartre, Lacan etc) have claimed constitute the kind of being that constitutes conscious human existence. In Sartrean terms: there is a nothingness (or a cut) at the heart of being. The object, for example the inkwell sitting on the desk has a wholeness that allows it to be what it is. Yet a person is never simply what they are: they are a body with an excess of desires, projects, attractions and longings for something other than what they are. It is in this sense that the human subject is never what it is. We might say that the inkwell has a kind of wholeness whilst the subject is constituted precisely by the lack of this wholeness. It is in this lack which we find the self-destructive enjoyment (jouissance) which animates us and differentiates us from automaton which simply seek the most efficient fulfilment of pleasure.

My claim is that the value of this piece is by inverting the plaster cast Georgie has taken the sculpture from the realm of a whole and inert object into the fizzing world of the lack. The positive plaster cast, in its faithful reconstruction of the body, and its stone like materiality, calcifies the body into a simple object. Yet in their inverse in silicone, Georgie creates a Heideggerian vase out of the human form: something that is at once a something and a nothing. This established, the real drama of the piece comes into view. In placing two forms in tension with each other we might read Georgie as commenting on the structure of the personal relationship. If each is constituted by a lack (which as above is also an excess of desires, projects, attractions and longings) then there can be no hope of the two constituting a whole. The opposite of Plato’s formulation of the personal relationship as two halves rejoining to make a whole is established. Here we have two inherently lacking beings in their perpetual striving (and failing) to make themselves whole via the other. The bodies never fit together; in the embrace there is always someone who has their arm trapped in an uncomfortable position (3).

This space between existence and nothingness is further drawn out in Georgie’s invocation of disgust or the abject (to invoke Kristeva). Kristeva describes the experience of her “lips touching that skin on the surface of milk—harmless, thin as a sheet of cigarette paper, pitiful as a nail paring—I experience a gagging sensation … and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile”. Moreover, a fresh peach is not disgusting, whilst neither is a dry peach stone: yet the realm between life and death (the rotting peach) might cause a reaction in us. Kristeva comes to understand our bodily reaction to some things that are between life and death (including the skin of the milk) as a reminder that she is “in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death”(4) . We are always in a state of decay, a collapsing in on oneself, a moving forward. We are remined of the fact that we are not a static whole, but situated somewhere between static unity and total annihilation (a combination of existence and nothingness). It is in this sense that Look what the cat dragged in further navigates the realm of lack. It is disgusting (the thinning hair, bruised flesh, curled hair coming from one of the moles) but at the same time delicate and beautiful. The bodies invoke eggshells (again positioning themselves on the barrier between life and death), their hair makes pleasing lines as it flows across the rug and the bruising takes on a marbled affect. In attempting to position itself on this boundary, the viewer is unsettled and further reminded of their own lack of wholeness.

The title of the piece: “Look what the cat dragged in” permits of two complimentary interpretations. Firstly we might imagine a conversation between a couple late at night, where one has just come home: perhaps drunk, perhaps from being unfaithful and the other remarks (knowingly): “Look what the cat dragged in”. On this interpretation, we are reminded of our tendency for self-negation. We think consciously we want to become whole with the other, or that we aim at ever closer union, yet we are often driven (in less extreme ways) to undermine these goals. We do not always seek pleasure but jouissance since we are not simple unities but lacking beings. Relatedly we might read the title more literally as an actual cat dragging a still wriggling mouse into a scene of extreme domesticity of rugs laid out before a fire in a middle-class living room. The two objects might remain as the couple who glance anxiously at each other, suddenly wrenched from their delusional narrative as whole unities by the abject scene of death and decay created by the cat and mouse. On both interpretations we should read the piece as demarking an unsettling event, perhaps akin to what Sartre describes as nausea, in which both subjects realise themselves as inherently lacking beings.

Pip

[1] Ethics of psycoanalysis p.120

[2] Ethics of psycoanalysis p.121

[3] Yet we should note that this necessary incompleteness / barrier to becoming wholeness is exactly that which allows enjoyment. In negating the perfect embrace we can see what a perfect wholeness might have been and thus extract enjoyment.

[4] Kristeva: Powers of Horror p.2-3