UNTITLED
by Nancy Barton
I
Artistic practice is frequently characterized as "self expression," a label which presumes a stable, knowable self. 
There is, however, an abundance of evidence to suggest that the process by which we locate and identify with a "self-image" is fundamentally unstable. That this operation is one of narcissistic investment is particularly relevant to artists because, as in Narcissus' original unrequited love for his watery reflection, it is a visual image that makes all the difference.
The drama through which each of us acquires an "I" with which to represent ourselves in the world was characterized as a mirror stage by Jacques Lacan in the 1940s, and it portrays the submission of our earliest experience with its unruly, disjointed perceptions to the organizing principle of a unified image. Through this process, the infant, a mass of chaotic impulses with no vision of itself as an independent body, is captivated by the apparent completeness of its own mirror image. In identifying with the coherent picture of the baby in the mirror, a primary structuring takes place which forever splits the infant subject into two rival factions. The ambivalence of our identification with this self image leads to the twin artistic impulses of creativity and nihilism or, in other words, "the passionate desire peculiar to man to impress his image in reality" and the equally passionate desire to collapse systems and order for an iconoclastic return to the archaic territories of sensation and abjection.
II
It is always difficult to see the present moment clearly because we are so swept up in it. The trouble with family history is that it's the past that's always present, haunting our fantasies of clarity and distance with the irresistible pull of infantile memory. Art making, which I took up to express myself, hoping to escape from the constraints of my early years, is frequently described in terms of obsessional practice. If the key question for the obsessional is "Am I alive or dead?," then my evasion has brought me full circle, back home to my little brother's death in childhood.
The mirror phase as a structuring principle leaves the way for identification wide open. 
The stillness of his corpse was compelling. Someone who wouldn't run away, whose features mirrored my own--all but the eyes, sinking gradually into their sockets. Inspecting the image in my memory over the years, we have exchanged places.
Silence and corpses prefigure an identification with the dead. Silence, because to speak of the dead is to betray their trust, to risk shifting a poignant memory into the register of the banal. If we keep their secrets, they will never decay. If we never unseal the crypt, we are spared the guilty knowledge of the awful effects of jealousy. To reduce my perfect brother to a pile of bones and rotted cloth. It is a pitiful and ludicrous fantasy. My problem is that I was successful.
In my family, there wasn't much life to go around. I saw my baby brother as a source of support as well as my competition. When he died, it seemed we had somehow devoured him in vampiric succession. My parents and then I--I who knew what we were doing--had used him up until finally there was nothing left. I know it's not really me in the little white coffin, I've grown far too large to fit into that soft little nest. Maybe that's what I resent most.
These two poles, both rooted in the fundamentally unstable nature of human subjectivity, clarify the narcissistic structure which prefigures all forms of expression and reveal what has been characterized as the "aggressive motives" which lie hidden in charitable gestures. The death drive or that desire to decompose, deconstruct, or destroy the stability of alienating norms engenders conflicts which traverse all artistic practices; thus the divisions between abstract and representational, narrative or conceptual, decorative or didactic strategies are merely formal distinctions.
