🏴The two black “cuts” in this Luc Tuymans painting are not “cuts”, but the painterly expression of a zip, a zip that allows access to the empty torso of the sackcloth doll to stuff & bring it back to substantial life from deflated death. I think death is executed in every part of this painting of Tuymans’ childhood stuffed doll, even though I can’t imagine Tuymans was ever a child. The decapitated porcelain head, the cropped genitalia at the V, the awkward elbows: “A supposed mutilation that is or is not there” has taken place through the act of painting. Entitled “Body”, death is inferred by the present & absent body parts, but also the death of childhood.

Donald Winnicott has this theory about a healthy object that the child holds onto tightly in the first moments of separation from the mother’s embrace. The child goes out in the world, but needs something, some object, to make that transition from mother to social life bearable. For Elmo is was a blanket. Winnicott calls it the Transitional Object.

This object, as portrayed by artist Mike Kelley too many times to list here, is usually a dirty, smelly, one-eyed teddy bear kinda object. Kelley laments & generalises that parents usually take this object from the child to clean & repair when it gets too grungy or gungy.

I don’t know if this painting of the doll-object is Tuymans’ Transitional Object. It does mark the ‘1990’s moment when the artist would become “Luc Tuymans” as we know him in the artworld today. But more generally, I wonder if it is a Transitional Object at all. It doesn’t look that healthy. Mike Kelley, a committed & brilliant reader of psychoanalytic theory, said somewhere that it is hard to tell between the Transitional Object & the Fetish, which I don’t have room to think about now.🏴

📸 LUC TUYMANS, Body, 1990, oil on canvas