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Between December 1, 2000, and February 4, 2001, the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts mounted a show called “Obsessive Drawing,” curated by Dede Young, dedicated to exhibiting works in which drawing is the primary medium. The following is a meditation on the psychic structures of obsession in the work of art, based on the drawings in the show, and is based on a dialogue between the curator and myself, which was printed in the brochure for the show.
Obsession is something that consumes us, that we cannot escape. A thought haunts us, and everything else leads us back to the torment and pleasure of our obsession. We brood, we ruminate, we return to the same doubts and scruples, the ifs and onlys, the forbidden, the unbidden. Like a wet dog, we try to shake off what clings to us. But obsession cannot be shaken away.
Obsession signals the presence of conflict and ambivalence. Obsession is a mask to distract us from our obsessions. We do something obsessively because there is something else we are obsessed by, but cannot acknowledge.
We are torn between the demands of desire and the demands of the superego. Superego insists that we forswear fulfillment of desire. But we cannot.
We create symmetry to restore emotional balance. If we maintain symmetry, neither instinct nor superego prevails. The question of symmetry, then, is provocative: What prevails?
Zen-inspired Japanese ink drawing captures complex impressions in an unmediated moment. The moment of gesture is as transient as the world. Obsessive art, by contrast, rubs, rubs