Beyond Representation: On the Real and its Relation to Visual Art

John Coplans, Bas Jan Ader, and Michal Na'aman are three prominent artists. There is no apparent affinity between them: Coplans (1920-2003) was a British-born American photographer, Na'aman is an Israeli Painter, and Ader (1942-1975) was a Dutch performance and video artist. Their works of art of course also seem unrelated in any way. Coplans' most famous works are black and white large-scale photographs, in which he photographed his own body, without a face, in extreme close-up. Many of these photographs depict the human body as unfamiliar, or even defamiliarized, due to the body-parts' position, angle of shooting, and cropping. Bas Jan Ader made short films in which his slim figure, dressed in black, falls or dissolves into the dark. This falling and disappearing is intensified by his last work, In Search of the Miraculous, which came to a sudden end with his own disappearance while crossing the Atlantic Ocean. Michal Na'aman's paintings consist of two rectangular shapes one on top of the other that are each further divided into small colored squares. The painted squares are covered with layers of masking-tape concealing the picture's surface beneath them, while wet paint seeps from beneath and between the masking-tape layers. As a rule, the paintings include a written title, that is usually a quotation taken from an unknown literary or philosophical source.

Despite the radical differences between these artists, I would like to point out a certain aspect which, in my view, is shared by and revealed in some of their works of arts. All three of them, each in his/her own particular way, delineate a path towards the psychoanalytic notion of the real as it appears in Jacques Lacan's late teaching, through their works of art. This path, as I will show, is related to the human body, albeit neither by representation nor by documentation. It should be stressed