Beneath the Veil

This project examines a series of unpublished self-portraits by the Montréal artist Nicole Jolicoeur, produced during an intensive period of engagement in the summer of 1999.  The resulting images document both a sustained performance produced over several weeks and mark a major turn in her practice from the use of appropriated images to focus instead on her own body.  Jolicoeur’s work has long engaged with the photographic archives of early psychoanalysts such as J.M. Charcot’s theatrical images of hysterics and in particular images of symptomatic skin. As well, she has examined the little known photographs of St. Therese of Lisieux (1873-97) made at the Carmelite convent. These remarkable photographs suggest an interesting alternative diagnosis of bodily symptoms than those made by J.M. Charcot and his disciples at Salpêtrière.  In one case we have images of women, who have been diagnosed as pathological and in the other we have images of a woman, who was elevated to the status of sainthood—although their bodily symptoms were sometimes the same.

I want to draw attention to the creative connections between Jolicoeur’s use of silk fabrics to drape the appropriated images of 19th Century hysterics, her examination of the performative nature of the photographs of St. Therese of Lisieux and the unconscious recollection of an exhibition of photographs made by Gaetan Gatian de Clérambault (Lacan’s “master”) of the drapery of Moroccan women. I believe that Jolicoeur’s thoughtful and committed engagement with the two projects mentioned here and her internalizing of the obsessive documentation by Clérambault put her into a focused and attentive mindset to perform the draping or veiling of herself as the unconscious, but also logical, next step of the creative process. In this way, Jolicoeur transforms herself through the performative embodiment of her own obsession with these found images.

These beautiful and mesmerizing Polaroids also suggest something about the malleability of skin itself. Skin is a living surface and the hysterical body was capable of producing images on this surface. A veil is also a tangible surface and like the skin it both conceals and denotes the possibility of revealing.  Jolicoeur uses the veil as another skin, to mark that which cannot be seen. But in its concealment it accentuates that which is unseen as a scene to be seen. The veil like skin always has something to do with desire. It may blur, mask or obscure, but it is also a marker of what one wishes to hide or eroticize. My contention is that the veil, as another kind of skin, allows Jolicoeur to performatively enact the mobility of female subjectivity through her own fictive transformations.

In this essay I will raise questions about the connective relationship between human skin, veiling, photography, and psychoanalysis in Jolicoeur’s work, including the appropriation of Charcot’s archives to build a critique of the early discourses of psychoanalysis: especially the construction of the hysteric as a silent performing body; the act of draping or veiling to produce mis-en-scènes on another skin; and finally, the performative use of the artist’s body itself, to probe the possibilities of female subjectivity. As an artist whose works have often centered on her own body, I will discuss the problem of boundary and the contentious territory between subject and object.--Patricia Levin