There is a kind of radical cool associated with otherness and suffering, as reflected in David Bowie's song about Jean Genet. But it is quite another thing for the sufferer. Similarly, amidst the art world's often trite theoretical flirtations with otherness and suffering, it was quite another thing listen to the presentation by Jean Mathee at Studio 2666 on Friday evening.

I have to confess that my engagements with theory have often resulted in snorts of derision and utterances like “Ooh, hardCORE!” when I read about snotty spoiled upper class academics' tame ideas. Not that I'm a cool outlaw. I'm just someone with a sustained experience of being an abject social outcast, and believe me it's a thought-provoking role. And it makes you think about who else might be going through this stuff, especially in a country like ours in which the systematic destruction of self-worth was, not so long ago, a primary function of the state. So I have been bothered quite a bit with this niggly problem of finding art debates a little unfulfilling, to say the least.

The basic assumptions which Jean rejected from the outset were those very commonly heard in a society as intolerant of suffering as ours: the Freudian notion that those who claim to suffer are only playing up this experience in order to gain some kind of power. Like kids trying to get attention. Because, according to Freud there can surely be no other good reason for suffering. My experience at Michaelis makes me think of this as the Pippa Skotnes model.

Fortunately, there have since been deeper thinkers. Jean discussed a complex range of models for understanding the suffering individual, and ideas about how suffering might shape an individual's desire. Along with this she also posited a role for art-making which sounded to me like music for the ears of the sufferer. Once again moving beyond Freud, whose view of art was that it functions only as a source of secondary satisfaction for those sad creeps failing to get primary satisfaction (to wit, a shag) Jean argued that making art could be a process with worth intrinsic to itself: the worth that comes from undoing hereditary desires and constructing new ones. She was talking about a truly daring journey, a journey which is as scary as death itself because, once having started on it, one risks never finding one's old self again: the journey of transformation.

Labels: Jean Mathee, Studio 2666