Lack, 1996
1996
sculpture
36" x 5" x 3.5" (each arm)
stuffed fabric, permanent marker
Four business-suit sleeves, stuffed soft and boneless, lean against the wall like amputated limbs. Drained of the body that wore them, they have lost the thing the suit promised: potency, uprightness, the phallic posture of work. The hands at their ends—pale, mitten-blunt, fingerless—spell L-A-C-K. Here the body does not labor; it becomes a letter. Castration, for Lacan, is this: the subject cut from jouissance and handed language as compensation, subjected to the signifier that names what it can never recover. The suit is the uniform of that bargain—the Law, the workday, the symbolic order—its sole product, spelled in its own slack arms, absence. At each severed base the abject opens: a wound glossed in pink satin, slick and coy, the gash sweetened, almost playful—as if violence could be dimpled into charm. Work makes lack. The arms confess it, and cannot grasp.