Feel Good Gene from page 1 do with strength of character.” Of course, it is true that 80% of the population lost the sweepstakes, are more prone to anxious states, and are therefore “genetically disadvantaged” regarding bliss. “What we really need is a drug that can boost anandamide—our bliss molecule—for those who are genetically disadvantaged” (Friedman, 2015). There’s hope for the 80%. Actually, Friedman’s assumption that psychoanalysts view anxiety as having the sort of psychological origin or meaning that can be explained and resolved through psychotherapy is a misreading. That 80% of the population is susceptible to anxious states, and that the other 20% only suffer from them somewhat less by virtue of their brain chemistry, is entirely understandable in psychoanalytic terms. The psychological origins of anxiety are not discrete life events that can be worked
out in therapy, but inherent characteristics of our civilized social being. We are all more or less anxious beings insofar as we live in cultures with established structures, laws, and taboos. There is no culture without permission and prohibition, and thus without both bliss and loss. Anxiety is the signal that guides us on the path between bliss and inevitable loss. Indeed, it is the inescapability of loss that launches us as cultural beings and propels us in the very pursuits that sustain our cultural life. Without anxiety we could not become articulate and effective as cultural beings. Ananda, pure bliss or perfect happiness, may be a spiritual point of reference, a mythic ideal, but it is neither an actual condition of life nor the goal of psychoanalytic treatment. Anxiety is a fulcrum of psychoanalytic treatment and an experience that the analyst learns to pay attention to. However, that attention is not directed at eliminating anxiety and replacing it with bliss, but instead at seeing where the anxiety is pointing, at
recognizing what signal it is sending, since it is by coming to read those signals that the patient benefits from analysis. It is true that coming to read the signals of anxiety means that one may be less disturbed or blocked by the experience of those signals. In this sense psychoanalytic treatment may appear to be directed at reducing anxiety. But a more accurate picture is that it is directed at coming to know how to use anxiety, to get along with it, and to be less stymied by it. That a person may appear to be less anxious as a result of successful analysis is merely a by-product of knowing how to read it. If Richard Friedman is correct and the bliss pills are on the way, we will ultimately see to what extent people choose to engineer good feelings, or whether they continue to see a benefit in listening to their anxious ones. z
gestures that are recorded via a hybrid of the photographic print and hand-rendered picture. Her works on paper and occasional readings involve the repetition of phrases (I USED TO THINK THAT IF I LOOKED AT A FORM IT WAS ABSOLUTE) that may recall enforced learnings or time-killing punishments doled out to unfortunate elementary school students in the past. DeNaia’s developing art occupies a cool center in a maelstrom of Instagram overkill
and feverish selfies, a ubiquitous social phenomena whose effects on our recollective processes and in how we mediate encounters with all things new have only begun to be studied. In systematically extending an action of dubious value into a series, Gina DeNaia breaks some rules of what comprises the photogenic and in doing so reinvents the wheel as a way of moving forward. www. ginadenaia.com. z Tim Maul Image Editor
REFERENCE Friedman, R. A. (2015, March 6). The feel-good gene. New York Times Sunday Review, p.S1.
On the Photography of Gina De Naia Working in San Francisco in the mid1960s, Bruce Nauman galvanized the international art world of that transitional moment with a visually arresting body of sculpture, objects, videotaped studio activities, and photography, leaping to the front of the class, from a New York perspective, out of nowhere. The impact of Nauman’s Eleven Color Photographs (1966) upon art (less so staid “photography”) is enormous, and in so-called conceptual and behaviorist/phenomenological body art of the early 1970s, the still or moving image functioned as a performative “real-time” space essential to framing the humorous (William Wegman’s videos, burlesquing Nauman) and the provocative (Hannah Wilke’s glam-feminism). Gina DeNaia’s recent photography, videos, drawings, and painted works derive both from Nauman and a generational enchantment with handheld imaging technologies that evolved photography into a habitual act. Central to DeNaia’s developing art is a form of self-portraiture reliant not on appropriative characterization(s) but the execution and clinical documentation of tasks, some of which appear mildly transgressive in a juvenile manner. In a series of truncated portraits, DeNaia does not apply makeup but “paints” her lips with her thumbs using red acrylic, resulting in a beguiling, if not bloody, “mess.” She also “plays” with, and therefore “wastes” matches, a huge childhood no-no. Again using her fingers as digits, she counts, making prelinguistic numerical
3
DIVISION | R E V I E W
SUMMER 2015