Diary Drawings

Pollock’s drip paintings. Working at so many levels to play off the gender-oppositions of artist and mother, the professional and the domestic, the heart of this performance was the unexpected and hence deeply shocking and moving moment in which Bobby Baker, telling us of her post-partum depression and a physical illness that also afflicted her at this time, laid herself down in the centre of the sheet, amidst the physical mess of her food art to create an image, which has remained with me ever since, of the kind of unspeakable agony that lies at the heart for so many women of their childbearing: post-partum depression. It is clear now from more

research, prompted by women’s pressure, that for some women, the processes involved in pregnancy and giving birth actually precipitate prolonged depressive illnesses. Some recover, some relive its horrors with every child they bear, some are marked for life. It is certain that our culture does not fully want to know, understand, support or help a condition that so dramatically contradicts the ideologies of motherhood as blissful fulfilment. Independent

of whatever delights in children or feelings, the often deranging emotional distress precipitated by this massive event must also have its own psychic as well as chemical structure. How can we be brought to something beyond mere intellectual knowledge? How can we feel what all deep psychological conditions create: the gap that opens up between those who have never felt this way and the suffering subject quivering in the excruciating pain of every second, experiencing such pain that it seems unimaginable that one could endure even 60 seconds more, let alone 60 minutes of an hour and then 24 hours or a life? This self-portrait drawing might firstly seem simply a register of the face. But it is a face full of the pathos of suffering. The energy is drained. The eyes are hooded and unfocused. The elegant and subtle lines with which this ‘beautiful’ drawing has been made all curve downwards, formally producing an effect of impenetrable sadness. But then all naturalism, finely realised, slips as we encounter two mouths. I do not know how to read their meaning. We have departed from the conventional techniques used by artists to produce effects: the slightest inclination of a line produces both likeness and affect. But here Bobby Baker has added a dimension that marks a deeper and less recognisable difference: something truly estranging. The following drawings pursue this search for a visual means to register what extremity feels like, to make images of it, by utilising the evocative capacities of the visual languages of figurative painting to such a degree. Twentieth-century art such as Cubism and Expressionism pushed those inherited languages to their own kinds of formal extremity, demanding that their viewers accommodate to distortion and deformation as a necessary means to ensure authenticity. Surrealism added other kinds of extremity which included violence and mutilation as well as disturbing hybridisations and permutations. Bobby Baker’s work does not belong in any of those categories precisely because she works with a different kind of contradiction: between the extraordinary clarity of colour, the sureness of drawing, the comforting familiarity of her figuration and the pathos they inscribe. Drawing perhaps more on a legacy of cartooning and children’s illustration, she makes the domestic and comfortable ordinariness that in other circumstances might give rise to wry smiles and indulgent humour, split apart into a confrontation with agony. Literally, in this image from Day 22. The bloodied wound severs the head, dividing the self from the self, the right from the left, down to the groin and blood trickles on down the inside of each leg. In the gap created by the severing of the body and the mind is a terrible gap, a nothing. The entry for Day 25 takes us further into this disintegrating sense of coherence, to place the sad-face portrait as now the benign and bearable mask that hides a more hideous and sinister presence, grimacing, staring, manic. The switchback of a certain

condition is marked by a repeat of the bloodied severance, the face lifting off from the skull around which the ash-blonde hair now stands on end. The irremediable contrast between the dead, empty eyes and the fearsome identity now no longer invisible behind them, suggests a feeling of disorienting possession and alienness that in a terrible way, by the use of this device, becomes the hidden truth against which the sad-face seemingly has no resource: succumbing only further to a human emptiness in the battle with this manically alive but terrifying occupant of the place of the self. The only place of the artist-self as still a self is in the very courage of making such an image. Entry Day 43 shows us the façade of sad-face, the familiar image, tentative in space, now painted on to a flimsy construction of bricks, which is falling down. Part of the head lies on the ground. A section of arm has fallen off. Both physical identity and mental wholeness feel fractured. The brick divisions render what holds together the imaginary unity of person, body and soul/psyche suddenly visible as lines of potential breakage. We use the phrase, breakdown, for extreme mental suffering. Those who have never been broken or feared for their own capacity to ‘hold it together’ never notice those fracture lines, or how once one has been broken, the rebuild will look like this: scarred forever with the doubt that the unbroken never imagine in their feeling of cemented unity. Other images in the diary return to the device of the doubled self. Diary entry day 496 reworks the contrasting faces of tragedy and comedy. In a bolder and more linear style of drawing the Janus-headed creature faces in oppposite directions, one manically happy, the other weeping. Diary drawing 543 gives a very different version of the duality but returning once again to the idea not of two competing facets, but a deeply divided being in which the appearance of the person who greets the world, and even performs in the Baker uniform, is a kind of strap-on carapace behind which a shrieking harpy tries to catch the world’s attention. This image brings to mind the famous poem by Stevie Smith, ‘Not Waving but Drowning’. Some part of the self longs to be seen, to be heard, and all the gestures that attempt to solicit help and understanding at the level at which the pain is being experienced seem to be invisible to the others. They see only the opposing faces, happy or sad, not the appeal for help, not the recognition of what it feels like ‘inside’ beyond a seeing. The hugeness of the gaping mouth stands for a soundless shriek. It links across the work with two other aspects – the terrible anxiety resulting from what medication does to the body. In one image titled ‘pre medication’ and ‘post medication’, two bodies are shown. The first shivers, slight and fading. The second, ballooned into overweight sweats uncomfortably (Day 397). Deprived of control over the housing of our own being by the chemicals proffered as the ‘cure’ or rather the means of manage-

ment, who then is the subject? The artist seems to be showing us how a psychic disintegration and loss of wholeness and manageable consistency is further aggravated by what is done to the body so that the split is felt at a further level. Bobby Baker’s most brilliantly biting and cruelly truthful image-making is saved for her representations of those who would help her – psychotherapists and consultant psychiatrists. When I saw the exhibition these images of the professionals at first gave me most wicked pleasure, and then the deepest grief. Bobby Baker’s keen eye, whatever her state, recorded those tell-tale details about the buttoned-up, closed, clean, carefully managed selves who in smart clothes and tight fashionable shoes sit opposite a desperate soul who is drowning in unimaginable daily emotional pain inside an unruly body and in self-distressing alienation from the calm and even plane of bearable psychic normality. The health professionals, it would seem from the drawings, are unable really to hear or to see the true state of their patients’ feelings. Bobby Baker shows how she must manage her own self in their presence, to protect them from the true understanding of the wilderness and wildness of her illness. The drawings, so controlled in their mastery of the challenging art of painting in watercolour, so precise in their characterisations of self and others, so astute in reading the tiny and trivial signs that are the true indices of each person’s state and condition, nonetheless, articulate a profound rage: rage that she who suffers the torments of psychic breakdown in a world so hopelessly unable to hold, contain or even recognise the pain lived in that internal landscape has to take into her own consideration at all times the feelings, sensibilities and capacities of those to whom she turns for help. I do not pretend to understand what is the personal context of the drawing titled ‘My Psychotherapist’ (Day 165). It would be presumptuous to do so. But what I see in it is a dire reminder of the huge risks involved in that intimacy under the conditions of the psycho-therapeutic contract. Recently Christopher Bollas – speaking at CongressCATH, 7 July 2005, and in his novel I’ve Heard the Mermaids Singing – has joined with others in the field to express anxiety about the directions in which interrelational psychotherapy has taken us. The main problem is an interpretation of Freud’s core concept of transference and counter-transference and the notion that the past is worked through in the present of the actual relation between analyst and analysand. This can frequently be reduced to a peculiar torturing of the analysand whose words, carrying often intensely experienced pain and produced at great emotional expense become empty signifiers turned back on the analysand as the analyst takes everything said to ultimately refer to themselves. The technique of seeing the analyst as a cipher of all the parent and other figures imaginatively addressed in the analyst’s psychic theatre can so easily be perverted so that

the analytical space becomes instead a replay of the very brutal battles and woundings by which the analysand is still scarred and bleeding. The image of the psychotherapist, with her figurehugging peacock blue bodysuit and winkle-picker shoes, armed with a knife in her claw-like hands and a tongue as bloodied as the hugely elongated talons of the right hand is hardly reassuring. Instead it reminds us of the almost physically wounding power of words – especially those of the analyst who boldly tries to reflect back to the analysand or therapee so-called tough truths. I am of the opinion that few people in real distress should be exposed to analysts, since the work of analysis requires a psychic resilience

for the process, which is not tempered, in general, with love. Thus the images of therapists and psychiatrists in Baker’s Diary need to be taken very seriously by those professions. They add their shocking visual representation to the growing unease about the

psychological effects of current British practices. Baker’s visual self-analysis, a parallel register of living with psychic pain and worse, moves beyond the private space of a diaristic recording for herself. Entering, bravely, as she has allowed them to do so, into the public realm where art intersects with mental health care, the work offers itself as testimony in a public cultural court. Few people feeling the way Bobby Baker’s images reveal to have been the inner world she has lived for so many years could retain enough outside of that experience to recast it in such vivid imagery – an imagery that works only because of such fine calculations of the technique, the materials and the repertoire of imagery. But if I construe one level of the Diary Drawings as a kind of evidence, a visual testimony, there is a danger of confining the work within an expressionist pathos of the artist as patient. We need, therefore, before concluding, to draw back and draw a larger picture to ascertain yet another level of understanding of what Bracha Ettinger has called ‘artworking’ (Ettinger, 2000). One of Freud’s key concepts of how psychoanalysis transforms the subject is the idea of working through. This work/Arbeit also appears in two other key concepts: the work of mourning, and dream work. To these Bracha Ettinger has added ‘artworking’, suggesting not a purely therapeutic function for art, but rather the possibility that in making art and in responding to art thus made, certain transformations can occur, certain inner changes can be wrought in relation to the trauma we or others suffer. She calls art a possible ‘transport station of trauma’ and suggests that unpredictably, depending on the susceptibility of each participating subject, art may become an occasion for some kind of transmission, that causes changes in the partners it creates through the encounterevent. Thus art is not perceived as a simple vehicle for the expression of the solitary subject’s contents that the viewer comes along and reads off, dispassionately or affectingly. Instead, art may open up a space between subjects, projected and imagined in the making, recalled and projected in the responding, that can, by mediation of the shared space of the work, cause transformations on both sides, even delayed in time. What prompted and sustained Bobby Baker to keep a visual diary, what it did for her on a day-to-day basis, opens out to the space implied in the very act of making something to see. It builds upon a hope that someone might not only see it, but truly see it, see what so many of the drawings are about: the pain of what remains unseen/unrecognised by others but horribly felt by the artist herself. To fragilise her own boundaries to the point of daring to make the images, to share already with the paper and the other selves there depicted, is to invite others to fragilise their own frontiers to create shared thresholds. This means not merely looking at the work as either amazing drawing/painting or the voice of

an anguished soul. In both cases the viewer would then maintain the boundaries, and keep a distance. Old Kantian aesthetic judgement is mastery at/by a distance. Identifying the other’s subjectivity locked inside her expression is also to refuse to let the trauma leak out and seep into one’s own subjectivity, where a different kind of responsiveness, what Ettinger calls response-ability, may, in receiving the transmissions from a place that is unknowable to anyone else, even if they have shared some similar kinds of psychic pain, becomes an active element in assisting the shifting of trauma. This is not at all about empathy. I spoke earlier of the problem of love, or lack of love, in analytical and other kinds of therapies. Loving, in the ordinary sense, is obviously not enough. Indeed in the Diary Drawings, Baker shows the burden carried by family members, when one of their own is subject to a kind of perpetual weeping, a swamping of all of their joys with the stream of her tears. The darkening of the entire atmosphere by the black sun of one member’s depression burdens the entire group who bravely mobilise love to help, a love that remains stubbornly helpless against the deadly negativity that has the loved one in its relentless grasp. So I do not mean that kind of love – which is exhausted by the struggle. To the pain one is enduring is often added the guilt of being relentlessly ill in the face of so much but ultimately limited ‘love’. Bracha Ettinger is trying to explain that beyond the current models of psychoanalysis and its theories of how subjectivity works and hence how it breaks down, there is another level of wounding to which depression and other psychic afflictions bear witness. Heretically, but with the wealth of her own analytical practice and art work as evidence in support, Bracha Ettinger identifies another dimension in subjectivity which she calls the matrixial that is distinct from what she has named the phallic (Ettinger, 2000: see also Pollock, 2004; Ettinger 2004). The phallic is a legend about how we become a subject by separating out from the initial web of primary bonding and potential confusion with the Mother or the maternal fantasised as a holding and containing body. This may give rise to two fantasies: a terror of the collapse of our fragilely discovered boundaries with a subsequent return to a formless non-subjective mess. The other fantasy is born from the necessity energetically to police the frontiers of the constituted, territorialised self, to keep the self distinct from others. This generates a theoretical model of the subject as cut out from a cloth of formlessness, delineated via the imaginary within the boundaries of the body-imago as whole and unified. Supplementing this necessary level of formation of the subject that sustains the distance between subject and object, subject and other, Ettinger radically proposes that we are also formed through a much earlier, even more archaic, deposit of a different subjectivising potential for intersubjective co-emergence and co-affection.