11/7/2023 0 Comments Matthew barney facility of declineThe religious cosmology and experiences that Schreber described were constructed from the dualist transcendent worldview of Schreber's upbringing, and the monist worldview it pitted against, namely that of evolutionist popular-scientists and of psychiatrists who influenced Schreber in the years before his illness. This dissertation follows however other attempts to place Schreber's Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken in the context of its time, namely by presenting it as the product of a clash of two worldviews. The religious experiences and religious cosmology that the psychiatric patient Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) described in his memoirs have since their publication in 1903 been interpreted by psychiatrists such as Freud and Lacan as pathological symptoms of an individual mental illness. ![]() These markers, have always been used by men to identify themselves, to mark themselves as separate from the realm of beasts and more importantly to take them out of the supposedly inferior realm of the feminine, which has, historically been marked by the absence of these masculine signifiers. They instinctively know that these signifiers must exist like baseball cards, they collect, catalogue, trade and compare them. ![]() They nearly hysterically know that there must be something that must alert them to their manliness, to masculinity, something which they can use to take the idea of masculinity outside of the abstract and make it clear, real and actual. Men have always searched for proofs of their manliness, a measure, a marker and even a map to guide them. In fact, as long as there have been men who think and write, this question has been a reoccurring one. In Hamlet, the young Danish student spends the entire play pondering the heavy questions-life, death, and not surprisingly, what it means to be a man. However, these artists suggest that we are moving toward the possibility of abolishing such divisive identity categorical criteria and are beginning to formulate alternative means of defining ourselves in relation to others. ![]() Thus, we live in an intriguing moment in which identities are seen as fluid and evolving yet we cannot seem to relinquish the notions of racial and sexual difference. While postmodernism has seen the efflorescence of posts – post-racial, post-feminist, post-human – we are hardly free of the instinct to categorize others. Presenting oneself as raced and gendered in accordance with established codes reifies the ideologies that motivated the performances in the first place. This subjective mutability is the result of widespread recognition that identities are performative. In the postmodern era, binaristic conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality have become more fluid. These artists’ alter egos compel us to recognize ourselves as similarly fragmented and mimetic subjects. Thus, viewers, like clinicians, are hystericized in the process of attempting to convert performative displays of discordant and ahistorical symptoms into coherent narratives and stable identities. By implication, they ask audiences to diagnose or fix their protean symptoms and identities. As with hysterics, Walker, Barney, and Sherman pose themselves to viewers as a question. This void manifests as dissociative split selves produced by way of hysterical identifications in which the self is (con)fused with an other. Identity, like the ostensibly obsolete malady, is a performance of subjective lack projected upon the surface of the body. Though hysteria is widely perceived to be an antiquated relic of the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle, I argue that the mimetic condition epitomizes postmodern subjective shifts. These two developments have resulted in a cultural shift characterized by the notion that subjectivity is a performance of the self as a series of simulacral images devoid of any original referent. This mainstreaming of hysteria arose in the wake of the demystification of the modernist notion of the sovereign subject as well as the supplantation of reality with simulacral images. ![]() I posit that their creation of diegetic alter egos demonstrates how the subjective splitting once attributed to hysteria has become a postmodern norm. "Portrait of the Postmodern Artist as Hysteric" explores the art of crossover celebrity artists Cindy Sherman, Matthew Barney, and Kara Walker.
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