General Artist Statement:

Using a variety of media, I imagine forms, space, sounds and actions that interrogate the concept of 'boundaries' as it mediates our notions of both personal and social relations. The idea of a boundary can take many forms and I have conceptualized it as body edges at the skin, land divisions, interpersonal encounters, in physical, political and social terms as well as linguistic and psychological ones.

I am interested in how meaning is constructed and how words and preconceived knowledge lend themselves to establishing a kind of certainty..."this and not that"...thus creating and solidifying boundaries between things and ideas, while limiting possibilities for new relationships and understanding. Materials and actions through the body (including sounds and language) are examined in order to reconsider how and to what end interrelationships are made or blocked.

Through the work I am experimenting with ways to move beyond individual boundaries, of negotiating among language, social customs, and fear in order to navigate the inherent instability of relationships. Love factors heavily as a concept and an action mostly because it is an enigma, difficult to define.

At one time my desire was to establish more solid personal boundaries in order to prevent leakage. Now, I search for the places where there is a perpetual spilling in and spilling out, as all meaning is created in the exchange. This means stepping into the unknown, an uncontrollable, imperfect site of potential that is always in flux, like water, breath, and skin.

text used for printed pieces in "What I Know About Love" --written by b. yontz, 2003

Including Boundary and Desire: Love As Transgression    "All You Need Is Love" "Love Hurts" "Love is a Many Splendid Thing" "I'm Never Gonna Love Again" "There's a Thin Line Between Love and Hate" Love is a theme that has confounded the Western mind for thousands of years. The earliest references to the term are found in the legends of Gillgimish, the first written myths or stories relaying the experiences of human beings. We find love mentioned in the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, in the translations of Plato, in Greek and Roman myths, in romance stories of the middle ages, and then in the retelling of these stories throughout Western history. Some of the divergent and contradictory aspects of love show up in popular song titles today. Our culture is preoccupied with love, which is represented in films, songs, videos, advertisements, greeting cards and books. My interest in love is as a potentially transgressive experience, a rupture within dominant ideologies. However, because love is an idea, an experience, an action, a process, it is not easily definable. Yet it contains within it the potential for identifying social and political predispositions concerning ideas of 'difference', for unseating rational language with its tendencies for (mis)understanding, and for exploring relations between self and other. Love is a signifier in the sense used by Mary Kelly: the truth of the signifier is in the impossibility of knowing it. In this regard, popular representations of love, though incomplete and misdirected, can provide some sense of love in their contradictions as they perpetuate the misunderstanding of the concept. A more complex awareness is provided by aesthetic endeavors such as poetry, art, and literature as they attempt to provide, not so much simple answers but rather pursue heterogeneous, contradictory possibilities. An actual understanding of love is something that can be accomplished only through experience, a bodily act, sensate, momentary and unsustainable. Michel Foucault provides a critical theoretical foundation for the exploration of love through the model of archaeology, an unearthing of previous discourse not as fact but as evidence. The focus of my inquiry is related to ideas of love as they grow out of the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, and the French feminists. Freud articulated ideas about love within a context of human psychic functioning, in particular subject/object relations. Highly influenced by Rene Descartes, Charles Darwin, and new discoveries in science, Freud attempted to explain human behavior and emotions, including love, in scientific terms. Freud's ambivalence about love is revealed in his own contradictory uses of the term. He variously discussed love as power, as pathology, as a vital aspect of human psychic function, as sexuality, and then also used the word to describe other functions, as though it had only one meaning. He argued that all love is a form of narcissistic 'wish fulfillment.' But he also idealized a love detached from emotion, such as the 'love of knowledge.' Freud's own contradictory characterizations of love provide areas for revaluing and subverting his conceptualizations. For the most part, Freud's psychoanalytic views on love were as a neurosis, a form of pathology. Recognizing that Freud can only be evaluated within his own historic context, subsequent authors have situated his theories within a larger cultural framework, particularly that of patriarchy. Freud's theories can be traced back through Hegel and Marx who both conceptualized the subject/object dynamic as a master/slave relationship. Freud also tried to understand human relations especially pertaining to those of gender and sexuality within these terms. Since it is this model which permeates culture, language, beliefs, politics, and, thanks to Freud, unconscious processes and the development of the human psyche, we must look at conceptualizations of love within this context. Feminists have challenged the phallocentric aspects of Freud's theories as well as the essentializing characterizations of female sexuality. At the same time, post-structuralists have called attention to the ways language and culture play important roles in ideas about love and identity. Freud profoundly influenced the twentieth century as his ideas have been absorbed and popularized. His writings, diverse and unceasing for over forty years, reflect his own contradictory and evolving theories of human psychic development and function. Virtually every author referenced in this study departs from Freud, either as a source for future elaboration or as a point of contention. A review of love is a way to destabilize Freud's ideas concerning the healthy ego, and theories that attempt coherence in general. Love then becomes situated within the tension that results from instability and contradiction, a position Julia Kristava refers to as the process of interaction, as a dialectic, a confrontation which allows change to occur. The Interpersonal Realm: Idealization, Narcissism, Transference, Counter-Transference Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved...they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them is ...someone who temps them... to use him sexually without his consent... Sigmund Freud...Freud's motivation was to alleviate human suffering. For him the problem facing humans was one of individuation, how we develop a strong ego to combat or at least contend with subconscious forces and social impositions over which we have little or no control. He developed theories about various processes to account for what he observed within human development, all of which serve to solidify within an individual a unique sense of self, and strong ego. Freud identified two basic instincts active in every particle of living substance (including humans), Eros and Death.   Life is viewed as an ongoing conflict and compromise between these two opposing forces. His interest in love was less than peripheral (though not especially scientific), as he called psychoanalysis, 'a cure through love'. For Freud love and communication between two individuals (the analyst and patient, in particular) defined psychoanalysis as a process. Idealization, narcissism, and transference, all based in the gratification of desire, became the cornerstones of his theory. These terms have become foundations in the language of psychoanalysis, even though subsequent theorists contest some of the meanings and functions as defined by Freud. The largely unconscious process of identification, fundamental to Freud's concepts on love, are played out in the Oedipus Complex. Here Freud conceived the normal development of the child as a process moving from narcissism to identification with a same sex object. For boys, the first identification is with the father. Hostile feelings emerge as the boy wishes to eliminate the father in order to satisfy his desire for his mother. However, the boy's object-cathexis of his mother must be given up to be replaced by either an identification with his mother, (viewed as a neurosis, leading to homosexuality) or an intensification of identification with his father but with a displaced object-choice, i.e. not his own mother. In this way, the boy is able to develop an affectionate relation to the mother (or women) while avoiding incest. Identification then becomes a way of connecting with a love object of the opposite sex. For the little girl, intensification of her identification with the mother is seen to fix her feminine character. Idealization for Freud is also an unconscious process in which an object is aggrandized and exalted in the subject's mind. However, Freud saw idealization as being possible in the sphere of ego-libido as well as in object-libido. Thus, idealization can grow out of narcissism, where the subject is in search of an infantile perfection (when he was his own ideal). A subject seeks to reform within an ego-ideal. Freud stressed that drives communicate with the unconscious via an ideational representative. Freud identified at least two types of narcissism. One involves the perverse aspects of self-love viewed as the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way as the body of a sex object. The second type is not necessarily a perversion, but a complement of the instinct of self-preservation one attributed to every living being. Narcissism is the first level of psychic development in humans and Freud traced a line in child development through auto-eroticism to narcissism to object-choice (which is also called love). Freud developed the theory on transference love (that of a patient for analyst) and counter-transference (that of analyst for patient), to account for the many male analysts who seduced their female patients. Freud differentiated between two types of transference, "positive" and "negative," and discussed ways in which these phenomena can be sensibly used within the psychoanalytic process. "Positive" love is seen by Freud to mimic real love, or normal love, between a man and a woman. In this situation, the analyst serves as the love "object." Freud saw positive transference as a way the patient could subvert the psychoanalytic process by creating a distraction. In negative transference (love), the analyst becomes the object of hostile feelings as a result of the patient clinging to misguided negative gains. Freud believed they received some pleasure or comfort from clinging to their illness. In this discussion, Freud is always discussing a female client and calls her love, immature or infantile. While recognizing the potential problems inherent in the power dynamic, many theorists still regard transference as fundamental to psychoanalysis. Transference is seen as basic to psychoanalytic process as it creates the opportunity whereby the patient, engaging in dialogue with the analyst, can reveal aspects of the unconscious. Love in the Social Realm: Power, Domination and Repression   The power of patriarchy has influenced our most basic ideas about human nature and our relation to the universe as a whole. It has become one, in which men--by force, direct pressure, or through ritual, tradition, law and language, customs, etiquette, education and the division of labor--determine what part women shall or shall not play, and in which the female is everywhere subsumed under the male... Adrienne Rich ...Freud envisioned patriarchy as the primal struggle between father and son played out through the Oedipus Complex. The son overthrows his father's authority, becomes afraid of his own aggression, and then regrets the loss of parental authority. As a way of alleviating guilt, he reinstates law and authority in the father's image. This process occurs exclusively between men. The part women play in this drama is as a prize or temptation, the object through which the men struggle. But their roles are subordinate, invisible, or taken for granted. Contemporary criticism has shown that what was assumed by Freud to be primal and inevitable is, in fact, a devaluation of women taking place within social and cultural history throughout the West. Lacan complicated Freud's work by elevating the role of culture, including language, within the development of subjectivities. He argued that because language and culture are dominated by patriarchy, the male perspective is the one through which we come to understand (or not) ourselves and each other. It is this understanding of the role of language in determining both the development of the individual as well as society that led subsequent theorists to search for ways to penetrate the linguistic overlay determined by and determining patriarchy.   Freud believed that humans must accept domination within society. Human destructiveness is such that it necessitates repression by civilization, which is, in fact, preferable to the chaos of nature. He likewise conceptualized a thesis-antithesis between ego-libido and object-libido, the more one is employed, the more the other becomes depleted, thus putting love of self and love of other in conflict. In a state of nature, aggression and the desire for mastery rule as necessary derivatives of the death instinct. Without the restraints of civilization, Freud believed that whoever is more powerful will always subjugate the other. So, the wish to restore early omnipotence continues to motivate the individual. Submission is merely the bad luck of the weak. The stronger makes the weaker his slave. Within these theories Freud maintained an essentialist concept of gender, with men as the strong and women as the weak. Freud's visualization of the conflict between nature and civilization and between love of self and love of other can create an impasse for social thought. Not the least of the problems is his equating psychic development within the Darwinian "survival of the fittest" model. Contemporary theorists are more concerned with situating the issues of subject/object relations within the larger social arena and recognize Freud's limitations in that regard. Love and domination are imagined as an interplay, a two-way process. At the same time, when confronted with the opposition between object love and narcissism, love of other and love of self, feminists, such as Jessica Benjamine have responded: "why choose? You can have both." The dualisms that permeated Western thought since Descartes are challenged in order to create new models that allow for exchange and inclusion. Repression and sublimation are fundamental to Freud's analysis on the development of the human psyche and theories of love. Sexual desires are repressed and then sublimated in order that the subject may function acceptably within the restrictions of socially sanctioned behavior. Fear of castration is one of the strongest motives for repression in men. In women, it is fear of loss of love, which is evident to Freud as a prolongation of the infant anxiety related to the loss of the mother's love. All of these repressions are part of the socialization processes. What Freud saw as 'natural' sexual desires create tension and neurosis.   Feminists authors since Simon de Beauvoir have questioned the logic of the castration complex, especially in relation to women. In particular, Hélèn Cixous reversed Freud's notion of "penis envy." Freud suggested that women wish they had penises and this desire created anxiety. Cixous responded by suggesting that women are able to be creative in ways men are not because they don't have a deep-seated fear of being castrated.   Love may be rethought with regards to repression by subverting the logic of Freud that maintains the ego must control the id. Norman Brown maintains that rather than having control over desires, why not eliminate repression. To this end, he revisits the Greek story of Eros as a model for having the aim of union with objects outside the self, while at the same time fundamentally narcissistic, and self-loving. In his conceptualization, dualisms are discarded and replaced with the possibility of integrating seemingly disparate ideas.   Eric Fromm differentiates mature and immature love in order to argue for union with integrity. Rather than situate love within the context of "fear of loss," it is envisioned as an active rather than passive endeavor. The problem of love as 'being loved' is inverted to that of "loving," of one's capacity to love. In Civilization and Discontents, Freud situates love within a historic development of "the family" and hence, patriarchy and community. Freud claimed that "we are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love." In this statement he equates love and suffering and pursues the line through anger and conscience to civilization and guilt.   The experience of love by women is seen as particularly narcissistic or hostile to civilization as it does not appear to have separation and aggression at its base. Freud's concept of the ego is autonomous and unitary, marked off distinctly from everything else except the id (the subconscious within the self). What is in most cases seen as pathological, the melding of boundaries between I and You, is evidenced in "love." The classic psychoanalytic view does not see differentiation as mutuality but as a process of disentanglement. Experiences of union, merger between self and other, are seen as regressive as merging is a dangerous form of undifferentiation.   However, new theories of intersubjectivity maintain that meaning emerges within a field of at least two persons. These theories focus on the social aspect of human growth and challenge Freud's model of love as pathology. At the same time, studies of infants support the idea that warmth and affection are indispensable to development, since infants do not begin life as part of an undifferentiated unity. For Freud everything is an extension of me-and-my-power, a conflict between independence and dependence, which uses the other only for self-certainty. Within the intersubjective view it is not only how we separate into oneness but also how we connect to and recognize others. The issue is not how we become free of the other, but how we engage and make ourselves known in relationship to the other, how we recognize the self as a function of the relational interplay. This perspective observes that the other whom the self meets is also a self, also a subject, rather than an object. In fact, Jessica Benjamine believes that within the notion of the "autonomous self" are the foundations for master-slave relationships. The absoluteness, the sense of being one and alone, is the basis for domination as the subject is searching for affirmation of the self through the other. Within "object relations theory" and British Kleinian analysis, psychoanalysis is viewed as operating in a two-person rather than one-person field, so that the investigation can be extended to the in-between. The idea is that two subjectivities, each with its own set of internal relations, begin to create a new set between them. If differentiation requires reciprocity between self and other rather than having autonomy as a goal, negotiating between developing a self and need for others creates necessary conflicts. Intersubjectivity advocates for a new approach to psychic development and love, embracing contradictions and paradoxes arising when we entertain two or more competing perspectives concerning the same phenomenon.   In an attempt to undermine the Western assumption that love leads to loss and pleasure to death, Carol Gilligan presents a revolutionary rethinking of traditional views of love, desire, and pleasure. She believes that dissociation is the psychic mechanism that allows survival in patriarchy. That it is an adaptation to splits in relationships between and among men and women. Desire, which is the endless wanting of what is believed to be withheld, loses its overlay of shame when we recognize that it is not competition but curiosity that motivates desire. According to Gilligan, love is a resistance to patriarchy since it by nature crosses borders and boundaries. "When we fall in love, we fall into relationships and outside of categories, because love is particular." Love is not idealized, but seen to embody the gritty pleasure that comes from living with the full range of emotions (good and bad) and taking on responsibility in having and using a voice. This also necessitates having the ability to simultaneously hold seemingly contradictory realities.    Desire as a Body: Irrational, Sensory, Split    For Freud, unconscious desire renders us only minimally intelligible to ourselves and often only sensible in retrospect. Through psychoanalysis, we can make sense of ourselves but that is nothing compared to the powers that have made us what we are. Lacan, too, acknowledges that it is unconscious rather than conscious processes that are more potent in motivating the individual. Language factors heavily in Lacan's theories particularly in regards to defining the "female" within patriarchal linguistic structures. He actually, determined it to be impossible to know the "female" as she (or it, as a concept) had been absorbed and regulated by language. Within the logic of Freud and Lacan, desire is embodied in the image, which is woman who is reduced to the body. The body then is seen as the site of sexuality and the locus of desire. This circuitous logic serves to obscure the cultural disavowal of things particularly female. As the perpetual "other" women become merely symbolic. Attempting to address this conundrum within patriarchal language, Luce Irigaray critiques language and provides a reconsideration of "love" as being vital to human encounters. Ultimately, she provides an alternative based on 'love in sexual difference' in order that the nihilism of the 'other' (the female) can be eliminated. Irigaray searches for a definition and appropriate language to discuss difference that does not involve value judgements. Using the intrauterine state as a metaphor, Irigaray challenges the prevalent psychoanalytic paradigm (Freud and Lacan) concerning the development of the self. She dismisses their phallocentric theories by simply recognizing that the maternal body comes prior to the phallus. Desire, which had been associated with the penis, becomes a need to be desired by the mother, the origin of life. This maternal body refers to the mother as original nature-body, complete with the notions of the sensible transcendental, mucous and passage, and the origin of a coherent body from the material. Though criticized as essentialist, Irigaray suggests a thought process by which negative bodily associations, previously discredited, are brought into discourse taking into account the source of all human life. Love, defined as a body, is not the repository of truth but rather an enigma, decentered, split, only to be misrepresented. Love is not a concept or idea overlaid within the social order but a body. And as a body it is not immune to being absorbed into language. Though these ideas about love and desire are all related to the body, in particular the female body, they are all situated within a particular discourse that privileges patriarchal ideals. If it were definable, love would risk absorption into, rather than revolution of, the patriarchal model.   The Act of Love: Touching, Transgressing, Copulating      Love is sense and nonsense, it is perhaps what allows sense to come out of nonsense and makes the latter obvious and legible...Phillipe Sollers...   The complex arguments in philosophy and psychoanalysis that create the foundation of an understanding of love are all rooted in the need to know things by constructing rational arguments. In an attempt to find new ways to define love that resist this tendency, some contemporary theorists discuss love as an action, a union, an in-between. Many of these acts take the form of resistance. Many have corporeal connotations. But all are intended to expand our understanding based on subverting notions of rationality and the singular, self-contained psyche. While early psychoanalysis as designed by Freud focused on stabilizing the individual psyche, sociologists such as Martin Buber were more interested in repairing what he saw as the injured human order. He highlighted the notion of the spirit as a space where the "between" in the life of events took priority. Buber said, "It is the reality of the spirit which builds worlds out of the world, and this spirit is in the final ground a communal one."   This can only be accomplished through holding the tension between affirming and withstanding contradictory yet essential aspects. Using the vocabulary of "particles" and "entering into the molecular zone" of another, Irigaray has found scientific basis for fluxes that happen "between" one's-self and the world. The realm of the perceptual comes to affect the realm of the real within touch. Viewed as essential for an exchange, she includes the idea of "touching" through words. Irigaray also brings into the discourse a notion of love not as a binding relationship based on singularities (as mother, or lover), but rather one that encompasses all relationships. Relationship creates connections in the "between" of separate identities allowing for ambiguating active/passive, self/other dichotomies. At the same time, the interaction between is more like a passage of becoming than the effects of a subject acting on a passive other. Sharing of desire and intimacy is how she defines love. Freud stated that being in love in ordinary life, outside analysis, is a more abnormal than a normal mental phenomenon. It is more like hysteria. Laplanche too, recognized that functions of the psychoanalytic experience, resolving, analyzing and dissolving meant, "slipping a knife in somewhere."   He believed it was only when a split occurred in the heart of the transferential imago is it possible to "slip a knife into the crack," which allowed full transference to evolve and be worked through. Reorienting the human psyche within the irrational provides a site for locating the splits and the enigma of the love relationship. Privileged moments of symbolic transgression, as instances of instability and breakdown in the subject and text are explored by Julia Kristeva. In these moments, according to Kristava, the symbolic is the site of semiotic ruptures and upheavals. Abjection (as it relates to the subject's corporeality and tenuous bodily boundaries), the notion of the pre-oedipal maternal (also corporeal and semiotic), and the understanding of romantic love are central for examining women, femininity, and female specificity to symbolic functioning.Kristava grants pre-eminence to the artist in the ability to rupture social and psychical identities, mainly through use of poetic language. She views "madness, holiness and poetry" as a means to render the "maternal debt" representable. Ultimately, Kristava is interested in destabilizing norms of representation and the structures of sexual identity. Love leads to a state of instability in which the individual is no longer "indivisible and allows himself to become lost in the other, for the other." This risk, which otherwise might become tragic, is accepted, even normalized. Pain, associated with instability, is what remains to bear witness to the experience of having been able to exist for, through, and with another. An exploration of love reveals the female absorbed into the patriarchal façade. For this reason, love is an enigma and a site through which the notions of male and female boundaries and desire can become problemitized. Notions of love are bound up with those of gender, difference, identification, idealization, transference, and others. As has been shown, these concepts, far from being clearly defined, are fluid and even contradictory, changing with human experiences and ideas. In an attempt to provide a coherent definition of love, theories abound. However, realizing that meaning is slippery, in constant flux, makes rational language as a means of representation problematic. Language attempts to fix meaning. 'Love' as a concept, which operate within a two-person dynamic, in the in-between of experience, which more closely aligns itself to insanity than sanity, illogical functions rather than logical ones, provides a site through which to examine and experience what it means to be human. And, if it is through aesthetic representation, that such tensions can be embraced and contradiction explored, it is through aesthetics that love may be better misconstrued. Rather than attempting to resolve the contradictions by the simplest means, into what Foucault would call "the calm unity of coherent thought," love actually speaks discontinuities, ruptures, and gaps. And in the final analysis, it is through the body with all its messiness and irrationality where love manifests in the sensate realm, out of bounds of language.