Psychoanalysis and the Culture-Breast (1): Conceptual Art, Jennifer Rubell

We are fed at the breast of culture, not wholly but to differing degrees. A series of public conversations around our experiences with cultural objects, with a focus on our emotional and unconscious attachments to art, literature, music, and film. 

What happens to us emotionally and unconsciously when we listen to a song, watch a film, encounter an art object, or read a novel? How might the way we engage with cultural experiences relate back to our earliest encounters with the breast or bottle as infants? How might our encounters with cultural objects be understood as a feeding experience that provides us with sustenance? What might our making of, encounters with, and uses of cultural objects tell us about ourselves?  

Each session will focus on a discussion of a particular cultural object made by an invited guest, which attendees are requested to access and engage with either during or in advance of each session. Each session will begin with an informal conversation between psychoanalytic psychotherapist and psychosocial theorist Noreen Giffney and an invited guest from one of the applied fields of art, literature, music or film, before opening up the discussion to everyone in attendance. The invited guests are Jennifer Rubell (conceptual artist, New York), Sue Rainsford (fiction and arts writer, Dublin) and Amanda Coogan (performance artist and sign language interpreter, Belfast). 

These sessions will invite attendees to enter into a shared experience with particular cultural objects, to facilitate individuals in the group thinking about their unique encounter with each object, but also to reflect on our experience with cultural objects in our lives more generally. 

This series is open to anyone interested in why we react or attach to cultural objects in particular ways. It will be of particular interest to psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychologists, counsellors, psychiatrists, group analysts, mental health workers and peer support workers, as well as artists and curators, and academic researchers and students in the fields of psychoanalytic studies, psychosocial studies, cultural studies, visual culture, and the arts and humanities more broadly. 

Places are limited so early registration is advised. This event is organised around the idea of a shared experience and conversation, so attendance is necessary. A recording of the event will not be available to registrants. 

This series is organised on the occasion of the publication of Noreen Giffney’s book, The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic (Routledge 2021), which introduces a new psychoanalytic concept, ‘the culture-breast’, to explore the formative and enduring influence of cultural objects in our lives.

• Series Schedule
  • Saturday 28 January 2023, 12 pm-2 pm (UK time) Jennifer Rubell (conceptual artist, New York). We will discuss a series of Jennifer Rubell’s artworks during the event
  • Saturday 25 February 2023, 12 pm-2 pm (UK time) Sue Rainsford (fiction and arts writer, Dublin). We will discuss Sue Rainsford’s novel, Redder Days, as a group, so please read the novel in advance of the event
  • Saturday 25 March 2023, 12 pm-2 pm (UK time) Amanda Coogan (performance artist and sign language interpreter). We will discuss a series of images of Amanda Coogan’s performances during the event

   

Convener

Noreen Giffney is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and a psychosocial theorist. She is the author of the book, The Culture-Breast in Psychoanalysis: Cultural Experiences and the Clinic (Routledge 2021), and the author and/or editor of a number of additional articles, books and book chapters on psychoanalysis, psychosocial studies, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the Director of ‘Psychoanalysis +’, an international, interdisciplinary initiative that brings together clinical, academic and artistic approaches to, and applications of, psychoanalysis. She lives in County Donegal on the north west coast of Ireland and lectures on psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies at Ulster University, Belfast. She has been taking singing lessons for almost two years and is enjoying the experience of learning how to make sounds.

Invited Guest

Jennifer Rubell (b. 1970) is an American conceptual artist who works in a wide variety of participatory mediums ranging from interactive sculpture, painting, installation and video to food performance. Her pieces often prompt viewers to violate the boundaries associated with art-viewing by touching, inhabiting, consuming or destroying the object. This exploding of the traditional viewer-artwork relationship simultaneously scrambles all kinds of seemingly fixed dualities: passivity-control; creation-consumption; permanence-ephemerality; participation-observation; safety-danger; exposure-privacy; feminism-femininity. Thousands of participants have experienced her performances and work in museums, galleries and public spaces around the world, and she continues to create new site-specific participatory work on a regular basis, inspired by everything from Ivanka Trump to the Utrecht Soccer Club. Rubell received a BA from Harvard University in Fine Arts. She lives and works in New York City.

Select performances and exhibitions include: Landscapes at Fondation Beyeler in Riehen, Switzerland; Old-Fashioned, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Creation, for Performa, the New York performance-art festival; Made in Texas and Nutcrackers, at the Dallas Contemporary; So Sorry, at The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto; The de Pury Diptych at the Saatchi Gallery, London; Icons, at the Brooklyn Museum.

Image credit: ‘Us’, 2015. Glass, 18 x 49 x 19cm (7 1/8 x 19 1/4 x 7 1/2 in). Copyright Jennifer Rubell. Courtesy of the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photo by Steve White.