Subtitled

Caitlin Devoy

21 August — 17 September 2016

SUBTITLED

There you are, the voyeur, outside looking in, unnoticed. Like a filmgoer, observing from the theatre, yet implicated within the space of the film as the eyes of the camera. In and out.

Look through the glass, ignoring its presence though it is solid as a wall. It wants to be both. A similar compulsion affects the objects. Their bothness is inexplicable. Whatever function or fiction they perform is ambiguous, incoherent.

The hysteric transforms sexual frustration, anxiety, melancholy, disorder into mysterious physiological symptoms. Blurring the boundary between the physiological and the psychological. The physician attributes a cause to the symptoms... “...pathologizing the unknown, the unacceptable, the uncontrollable”* Symptoms to be treated; by fumigation of the womb, massage of the patient's genitalia by the physician, or water sprays to cause orgasm.

Subtitled,subterfuge.

*Rousseau & Porter, in Sander 1993, Hysteria Beyond Freud, University of California Press, p.xv