Poetics Step 5 (Gaze)

STEP FIVE: 

Find yourself gazing at your painting/find yourself in your painting.

For Lacan, the gaze is an important part of the psychoanalytic process, for everything and everyone (the street walker, the person being gazed at, the gazer, the analyzed and the analysand). There is always that desire.

This gaze is highly relevant to the cinematic as well. In fact, it applies to the whole CATTt and makes it easy to end my poetics here, to flip the perspective and instead of seeing my project, to see myself seeing my project, to see my project looking back at  me. What can that tell us?

In this process, it is important to do two things: both impose and reveal your own gaze as an artist in whatever means that you can. You can do this by taking a picture of yourself next to your work (a selfie, essentially). You can also do this by taking a picture of your face on the computer screen (this works especially well if you're computer screen is the glossy not matte kind, although a blurry image of you can be made out on the matte screen). A third way is to actually take separate pictures of you and of your work and manipulate them on top of each other. A fourth way is to zoom in on your picture, and find evidence that you were there.

If you look at the blank space, you can see me in this image. Not my face, but the stains I have left upon the canvas. There are two kinds, the circular brush pattern has not been smoothed out, and the pixelation from the camera image I took of the hand drawing is also not eliminated from the picture, thus denoting that this picture was not, in fact, drawn digitally. Who can say that it was painted digitally too (except for the evidence of the paint brush pattern of course). Two opposing elements, then, are present here.

What happens to your image when your focus shifts and you are able to see yourself seeing yourself seeing your painting. How does your position shift when you've gazed upon the gazer? What about the fact that you actually made this painting? How is your painting looking at you? As a bonus step, repeat the methods for imposition or revelation, but ask someone else to do the gazing instead of you.