Day-Dreaming

Abstract

‘Day-Dreaming’ is a revised version of a paper given in the conference ‘Making Space’ on 25 February 2012. I have included some of the images I showed then, but my extraneous remarks (which I am unable to resist), my improvisations (as I responded to the audience), and my resistance to keeping to time are missing. I have retained the sense of direct address, for which I would ask the reader’s forgiveness. The text constructs, in a somewhat aleatory way, an analogy between day-dreaming, writing, and the production of what some may choose to call a work of art, making the gentle suggestion (at times a little insistent, voice raised) that it is itself a work of art. There is a tour of the artist’s working process in the studio, as I make an object and write an essay, in which there is a move from Freud to Winnicott, in an exchange on the creative process, with a sudden incursion of Lacan, supplemented by appearances from Mallarmé, Zola, Proust and several of their fictional characters. The model of a body – a torso – is gradually clad and the attention is drawn to folding, fixing, and material. The material moves in other directions, and finally achieves its object (one might say) as it is displayed and worn.