In the current issue of Text Zur Kunst, the writer identified most with the German art magazine, as its cofounding editor & perennial contributor, Isabelle Graw, asks “How Much Person is in the Product? On the Metonymic Interrelationship Between Works of Art and their Authors.” Graw uses Balthus’ paedophilia (the article image shows Balthus gazing from a distance at his young niece draped over a chair in his studio) & Georg Baselitz’s misogyny (“women cannot paint”) to discuss the difficulty of separating artist from the artwork in the face of biographical scandal or comment. Graw proffers two art historical approaches to this quandary: formalist & biographical. In other words, the observer either severs the relationship between artwork & artist, what the literary theorists called the “autonomous artwork”, or sees them as conjoined. The latter approach gets tricky when a monster emerges in the biography of the artist. Graw’s use of the word “metonymic” is interesting here, in respect to a theorist like Jacques Lacan, who uses it in terms of the Freudian dream. Lacan equates metaphor & metonymy with “condensation” & “displacement” in dream work. Condensation is a unifying structure, when images come together in the dream, like when vapour surrounds a boiling kettle. Whereas displacement is the juxtaposition or placement of images in conflict or tension a la Magritte. Like the metaphoric view through a morning window bearing a veil of condensation, Graw doesn’t land on either side of the binary argument. This is a proffering; like Balthus’ niece in the article photograph, who is closer to us than Baltus. With feminist brio, we can say her pose is powerful and Balthus’ weak, but the abusive puppet master always seems pathetic until they aren’t (Humbert Humbert in Lolita). And then there is the question of the separation of artist & product, and Graw’s contention with Baselitz’s misogyny (“women cannot paint”), whose presence & product placement — in what I am sure is another form of meta-critical condensation — appears on the back cover of the same issue. MAN SOLLTE🏴