The Gaze

"If a bird were to paint would it not be by letting fall its feathers, a snake by casting off its scales, a tree by letting fall it's leaves? What it amounts to is the first act in the laying down of the gaze" Lacan, J. Four Fundamental Concepts.

It is not conscious descision or will that creates these 'paintings' but something internal/ (physics? laws, hard determinism). The painting is still a reaction to something

I have been reading this book
Bracha L. Ettinger. The Matrixial Gaze. Feminist Arts and Histories Network, Leeds UK, 1995.

It is a little off the topic but i find it so interesting!! I really need to get back in to reading Lacan and Merleau Ponty I forgot how much it made me think and how awesome it is. Feminist literature gives me the shits (can you say that in Auckland?) in other words it scares me. I wonder who the feminist writings are directed at??? moi. moi moi moi.
We look at the Gzae and we are longing for it, desiring to be looked at by it but it is always hidden from us (insert comparison with double slit experiment here). For Lacan every object or absent object is a phallic object, symbolic of the castration process. This was also true for the 'object a' of the Gaze as well.

"You can never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see"-Lacan
I see myself seeing... I have had such horrible dreams lately, one in which my skin was rotting on my face, peeling off like when you drop acid on paint and it bubbles and decays. I also dreamed about zach but he was dead but glowing green and white and I felt so privileged to have seen him. Hmmm,


Just a note, obviously my sentences are lacking in structure and have no grammar and trail off or never finish or pop up in the middle of things BUT this is just a working space for me, not something highly polished :)