Separating the Art from the Artist
Lyne Lapointe, Okinawa, 2024, ink on paper, hemp, coral, and sand stars mounted on wood in an artist's frame, 51 1/4 x 41 1/4 x 8 1/2 inches, © Lyne Lapointe. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio.
What is the relationship between art and the self? In Becoming Animal, currently on view at Jack Shainman, Lyne Lapointe explores this question through the lens of A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s 1980 theoretical text.
Without the theoretical backdrop of Deleuze and Guattari, Lapointe’s multimedia works appear as unsettling explorations of the human form. In Beehive Apiarists (2024), bodies become overwhelmed by orifices, which appear as three-dimensional beehives or woven baskets extending from the otherwise two-dimensional frames. Other figures defecate, as with Herma and the Tide of Time (2022), or appear with engorged genitals (Bi-R-Mane, (2024)) such that it is not surprising to discover that Lapointe’s inspiration is rooted deeply in psychoanalysis—or more accurately, schizoanalysis.
A Thousand Plateaus is the key that unlocks the deeper meaning behind Lapointe’s uncanny visuals. Works illustrating the distillation of the body to its mechanisms allude to Deleuze and Guattari’s commentary on 17th century philosopher Baruch Spinoza and the understanding of a person’s relation to their physical form. In their collaborative serial Capitalism and Schizophrenia, of which A Thousand Plateaus is the second and last volume, the two post-structualists present a meandering and complex criticism of psychoanalysis and structuralism that even Foucault argued should be read as a work of erotic art rather than a absolute philosophical work. [1]
The 1980 Deleuze and Guattari volume is defined by their introduction of concepts that are ever-shifting and never fully realized, which may be precisely their point. Everything is a process. The idea of “becoming-animal” is almost undefinable; the threads Deleuze and Guattari weave point to a process in which existence is distorted and metaphysically transformed into a new form. For Deleuze and Guattari, art is a “false concept” and the production of true creative works can only be achieved through the act of “becoming-animal,” in which the artist releases attachment to semiotic form in order to become what they are envisaging.
Lyne Lapointe, In Vitro, 2024, ink on paper, hemp, linen, and blown glass eggs mounted on wood in an artist's frame, 58 3/4 x 42 x 6 1/2 inches, © Lyne Lapointe. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio.
At their core, Lapointe’s works are the products of these exercises in self-effacement; exhibition materials describe Lapointe’s process as one of material embodiment. The textural intricacy of the assemblages works in tandem with the warping of bodies depicted to guide the viewer beyond the obvious. Okinawa (2024) features a figure covered in sand with a piece of coral emerging from its stomach. Puberty (2022) illustrates an abstract, female-coded form—as one might find on the door of a gendered bathroom—composed of more sand and piles of small white shells. Many of the materials Lapointe uses are not manmade, conceptually binding the work to an idea of the natural.
In Vitro (2024) shows the bust of a figure looming above a collection of three-dimensional eggs. It is easy to read the piece according to its pictorial cues: there are clear references to IVF, pregnancy, and the manipulation of conception. With this understanding, the egg becomes a site of conflict, something that is both natural and unnatural. In the context of A Thousand Plateaus, the significance of the eggs mutates. For Deleuze and Guattari, the egg is a cipher, an incarnation of the “body without organs.” Another one of Deleuze and Guattari’s fuzzy concepts, the body without organs, in one such iteration (in abbreviated terms) is a never-ending practice of detaching oneself from corporeal needs and functions of organs that give us life and structure our existence. For Deleuze and Guattari, the egg is a state of suspended existence that transcends the organization of organs and the requirement ingestion and subsequent secretion that defines life.
In the final piece in the show, The Sky of Bangladesh (2024), there are no human figures; instead, we see a collection of animals collaged on top of a base of sand interspersed with colorful dots. A step closer reveals the dots to be eyes. “The organs distribute themselves on the Body without Organs, but they distribute themselves independently of the form of the organism; forms become contingent, organs are no longer anything more than intensities that are produced, flows, thresholds, and gradients. ‘A’ stomach, ‘an’ eye, ‘a’ mouth: the indefinite article does not lack anything. . .” [2] For Lyne Lapointe, as for all who strive, the body without organs cannot be reached, but perhaps it can be seen.
Lyne Lapointe, The Sky of Bangladesh, 2024, wood, ink on paper, linen, mica, glass eyes, rickshaw ornament painted on metal and framed by the artist, 54 1/2 x 72 1/2 x 2 1/4 inches, © Lyne Lapointe. Courtesy of the artist and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York. Photo: Dan Bradica Studio.
Becoming Animal is on view at Jack Shainman from February 27 to April 12, 2025.
[1] For further reading, see “Foucault, Episode 2: Do Not Become Enamored of Power,” The Funambulist, podcast audio, June 21, 2012.
[2] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 164.
