Jeannette Fischer

Wolfgang Beltracchi is a phenomenon of the international art world. His name is inextricably entwined with one of the greatest upheavals in the global art market. Emulating numerous world-famous artists, he developed and painted new paintings, continued their narrations and biography, and concluded them with a forged signature. His wife Helene Beltracchi then smuggled them onto the art market. Many experts were deceived by Beltracchi’s stupendous skill and auctioneers cast many doubts aside in the interests of insatiable market demand, selling the paintings as authentic works by the purported artists. Reading the artistic handwriting of a painting requires an exceptional willingness and ability to be able to empathise and identify with the artist, until you “can feel what the other feels” (Wolfgang Beltracchi). Through extensive discussions with the painter and his wife, the psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer explored this capability that is so pronounced for Beltracchi. In her new book, she places this in relation to the disappearance of Beltracchi’s own signature. As with her previous highly successful book about the performance artist Marina Abramovic, Jeannette Fischer has created an exceptionally insightful portrait of a fascinating artist personality.

Anxiety is a binding agent of human relationships. It constitutes and stabilizes the existing power relations. If these are not to be endangered, it must not lose its significance. The common discourse that defines and establishes relationships is a hierarchical one. Anxiety has a considerable leverage function in this narrative. As a consequence of the disempowerment of aggression in the service of the ego, it remains indispensable for the regulation of hierarchical relationships. The deprivation of these aggressions means powerlessness - and that is anxiety. The common assumption that anxiety is a feeling, a vital feeling that protects us from danger, is able to give us insight into its importance and indispensability for the existing power relations. It is not anxiety that protects us from danger, it is dread. In dread we are not afraid: the aggressions in the service of the ego remain undamaged. Thus anxiety has a completely different meaning: it is not an indicator of an imminent danger, but of an existing form of violence creating hierarchies and establishing power relations. Anxiety is exclusively a bonding agent of hierarchical relationships - and not a protective factor. It is thus anxiety that is to be dreaded.

Jeannette Fischer examines what it is that leads to hate and to hateful actions. Hatred against others begins as self-hatred. This in turn has its cause in feelings of guilt that were already triggered in us in childhood. To illustrate this, the author uses examples like the horrific rampage of Anders Breivik in 2011 and the decision of a young Canadian to join the IS. The victim/perpetrator and guilt/innocence narrative is a dominant pattern in our actions and discourses; we are held prisoners by it. And it shows up not only at the personal level, but also in social and political interactions. We cannot eliminate hate by condemning it, abhorring it, even hating it. Change is brought about only by leaving the vicious circle and making clear what leads to its creation.

In summer 2015, performance artist Marina Abramovic and psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer spent four days together at Abramovic's house in the Hudson Valley. Associating freely, they explored - from a psychoanalytical perspective - Abramovic's biography and art and what connects them. A better understanding of herself, her personality and her work, was Abramovic's objective. She claims that conversations with artists abound, with one curator saying this and another saying that. Yet there is no book in which psychoanalysis puts her life and artistic work in context. This new book aims to fill this gap. Yet it is not a therapist's report, nor a record of Fischer's analysis of Abramovic. It records the dialogue between artist and analyst attempting an interpretation of Abramovic's extraordinary violent performances that sometimes reach the brink of faint, even death. The two search for an understanding of the underlying structures and dynamics. Abramovic performs relationships, and she performs violence, yet she remains on her own in facing the pain and fear about it. The book is arranged in a sequence of dialogues, separated by Fischer's comments on and images of four of Abramovic's performances to which the psychoanalyst refers.