🏴The unconscious: “a place of thought that does not think”(Jacques Rancière).

Picture this: American artist Ed Ruscha cruising around L.A. — the billboard-thin backdrop to his text paintings & photographs — listening to the radio tuned into two stations, anticipating the expected & familiar pothole he has stopped avoiding over the years & grown to want, to need, to love as a “spiritual hotspot”. This all plays out in a short film that traces Ruscha's journey from L.A. home to L.A. studio. Never did I think L.A. would be the place where the unconscious would come forth in my consciousness, my definition, L.A. being a place that wears surface as history. But that's just it, the unconscious is not to be found in a dimly lit cellar where Freud's agents of id., ego & superego hide in a windowless three-cornered room with a swinging light bulb lighting up their uncanny personalities one by one. No. The unconscious is not the subconscious. The unconscious is Ed Ruscha on a bright & blue L.A. day enroute to his studio, tweaking the radio dial so that two channels bunk together, dream together; the stock markets on top, country & western music underneath. Freud called the unconscious a double inscription; Ruscha's radio is a double inscription. In the 1960s the French psychoanalyst Serge Leclaire, a disciple of Jacques Lacan, proffered the analogy of a radio tuned into two stations to describe the unconscious, except Leclaire's genre was jazz not country & western. Like the visual drone of David Lynch's Lost Highway, Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, America & its levels of thin seems more in tune with the enigmatic surface of the unconscious than anywhere else🏴

📸Ed Ruscha, Vine / Melrose 1999 (for Parkett 55, Lithograph.