Teasing the gaze

Question

The following text describes this video art.

1. Does "teasing the gaze" mean "playing with the the viewers' vision"?

2. Does "but importantly avoids being fixed and stabilised in the Lacanian register of the eye" mean "Although this work plays with viewer's gaze, it does not comply with Lacan's premise of the subject of vision being fixed and static"?

3. What does the green sentence mean?

4. Does "in string and bells" mean 'created by means of string instruments and bells? But, there is no clear string instrument or bell heard in the music. I think "in string and bells" should have a phrasal meaning.

5. Does "extends the processual expansiveness of the imagery" mean "expands the the images further"?

6. What does "re-finding rather than returning to a narcissian paradise" mean?

Text:

The work is narcissistically playful, teasing the gaze, but importantly avoids being fixed and stabilised in the Lacanian register of the eye. Vision is here solicited to drift on a journeying that reaches into bodily recesses to create new schemas that dismantle the rigidity of secondary narcissism. Again a soundtrack of a lullaby in string and bells provides a sonorous landscape that extends the processual expansiveness of the imagery, re-finding rather than returning to a narcissian paradise in which we can indulge in a transformational space of mutual gazing rather than being subjected to the cut of Lacan’s mirror stage in which we can only occupy one side of the mirror or the other (Art and Psychoanalysis by Maria Walsh).

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

catttt1. Does "teasing the gaze" mean "playing with the the viewers' vision"?

I guess so.

catttt2. Does "but importantly avoids being fixed and stabilised in the Lacanian register of the eye" mean "Although this work plays with viewer's gaze, it does not comply with Lacan's premise of the subject of vision being fixed and static"?

I know nothing of Lacanianism, but the sentence seems to say something of that sort.

catttt3. What does the green sentence mean?

Ummmm … what bodily recesses? Ewww? That aside, we organize our reality along certain lines, and this work shakes that up and makes us see ourselves differently.

catttt4. Does "in string and bells" mean 'created by means of string instruments and bells? But, there is no clear string instrument or bell heard in the music. I think "in string and bells" should have a phrasal meaning.

The melody sounds like it is being played on a samisen, which has strings. I do not hear a single bell. I have never heard "string and bells" as an expression. The singular "string" seems to indicate that she is not talking about stringed instruments. A Google search yields nothing useful except the idea that you can make a sort of booby trap by stringing bells around your position so that anyone approaching will jostle them, warning you. What that might have to do with all this is beyond me, though.

catttt5. Does "extends the processual expansiveness of the imagery" mean "expands the the images further"?

I would not say that. The work has a quality that the writer calls processual expansiveness. The "process" referred to is the way we process what we are seeing, and it is expansive, not narrow in focus. The music helps the image pry us open.

catttt6. What does "re-finding rather than returning to a narcissian paradise" mean?

She waxes lyrical here. I think I would have to know Lacan to understand this. But with my puny understanding such as it is, I get that the bathing beauties at the end have become something other than the usual objects as a result of the realignment of our perception wrought by the first part, but still the same in the final analysis.

Teasing the gaze

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