The following is a brief preview - the full content of this page is available to premium users only.
Click here to subscribe...
In Adam Geczy's small installation of paintings two large images of brides shed a lurid, yet almost surgical, light. There is an extravagant sterility in the detail of their dress, in the artisanal rendition of surfaces and light, in the sheer technique of painting. Immured in their painstaking rendition these brides are oddly, obscurely, unnerving. An approach to these unapproachable and yet absorbing paintings begins to crystallise around the word fetish, its' varying connotations and the history of its usage.
Over more than two centuries of theoretical parlance the word fetish has been deployed in several ways, the common factor being the recognition (and fear of) the power of the object. The curious homology, for instance, between the kitsch and surreal might be seen to stem from a shared recognition of the fetish, the 'mana' of object and artifice. Marxism and psychoanalysis inherited from anthropology both the term and the disapprobation it carried, the connotation that the 'natives' were still misled. For Marx the fetish was blindness to the totality of the thing, the full narrative of labour and surplus value obscured before the abject-ness of commodity and exchange value. The Freudian fetish is similarly metonymic, the cathected object is merely a shard of the psychic (Oedipal) drama. As the narrative and hermeneutic factors wane the fetish waxes, replacing the mystifying fetish with what might (with a nod to Jameson) be called the 'blank' fetish. Unlike the Freudian fetish the blank fetish is invested with nothing but itself. It is at once chastely outside of signification and yet pregnant with meaning.
But what of the bride? What has She to do with the object and the fetish? In the sense