New Ways In Psychoanalysis - Karen Horney Deconstructs Freud With Love

Horney Deconstructs Freud 1938

I have never before read Horney although I have had her books, glanced through some, sold some and lost or given away some. So now very late in the game I am reading her.

She carefully and lovingly deconstructs Freud's theories. The libido as instinctual, as biological and genetic. She observes that Freud's thinking is mechanistic based on evolutionary development. Her presentation is simple, very readable and answers so much theoretical formal bullshit that I suggest it be read carefully from that POV.

She tackles the ego, the super ego, anxiety, Oedipus Complex, Libido, Death Instinct, transference, and more in short chapters so readable I wonder how I could have missed her all these years. 

Horney's emphasis moves to the environment of the child and the culture the patient is growing up in. She obviously has studied Marx but gives no indication that she is an advocate of Communism. It is rare that early analysts touched on Marxian theory at all although later Marx would be interwoven with Freud as well as fascism would be.

And she opens not the window but a wide door to consider behaviorism and the result will be Wolpe's Behavior Therapy which seems to be the treatment of choice for almost everything these days and when it stumbles

Bring on the Meds!

My thinking is embedded in my thinking of Dora. For decades I have been on Dora's side of dumping Freud. Her father pimps her to Herr K the husband of his mistress, an older man for his 19 year old daughter who rebuffs him with a slap for seducing him with the same phrase as he seduced her maid, the sub text being that the two women are replaceable commodities; that there is an equal sign between them. Neither is unique.

Recently in rereading Philip Rieff's edition he acknowledges this aspect but goes deeper defending Freud. That Freud is probing deeper under Dora's symptoms to more instinctual incestuous wishes for her own father rather than the cultural environmental psychological sociological one I have been holding for many years along with many other feminists. Freud is after deeper fish.

And as you read Horney who omits this reading gives credence to the modern feminist reading of Dora among other case studies, as well as her work with her own patients. Over the chapters it becomes clear that Horney is interested in aiding her patients to become self sufficient from their symptoms and illnesses, to be functional in this obviously competitive capitalistic antagonistic culture they and she and all of us are in. She wants them to become "well" to be adjusted and contributing to their world in the best way they can. And there you have it.

While it is now obvious that Freud is not after this result. He is after the mind and "soul" of his patients. He is after their linguistic language knowing and thought in their minds so that they will be free thinking humans as he feels himself to be. Whether this means they will be contributing members of their culture or not is a decision each one will have to decide.

Horney studied psychoanalysis at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Berlin in the 1920's. this is only 25 years after Freud has published his groundbreaking Studies in Hysteria and Interpretation of Dreams. It is obvious by its absence that Horney was not analyzed by Freud, that she emphasizes the Ego development which characterized almost all of psychoanalytic treatment in the United States. What it did was put a premium on ADJUSTMENT to our culture to achieve within it, to contribute to capitalistic development.

 When she discusses treatment and some case examples we can see that she does not have the skills to work with resistance, narcissism and resistance was discussed in one of Freud's papers. It will take Spotnitz to put his thumb and hand on that aspect and demonstrate it publicly and it will be taught thoroughly by his students. It is invaluable. This is the center of Modern Psychoanalysis as taught in New York City and now elsewhere by former students. Rieff - Sontag's ex-husband - is suggesting this as what Freud might have done with Dora. But it is the Wolfman

who suffered the most if anyone has read his case and his life outcome, this privileged Russian Prince in his palace become a low income refugee subsisting on the dole of miserly psychoanalysts until he dies rather recently in the 1980's I think or not long before that. The last living patient of Freud so ill treated by his disciples but "pensioned" just enough to be sure he would never sell his story to a journalist and then lose it and be destitute forevermore. In her talks with him Oberholzer listens to him bemoan the fact that if it only hadn't happened that he contracted gonorrhea......And Oberholzer says to him, "Oh, the clap! I've had that!" And he is amazed at her insouciance concerning this dread disease he felt ruined his life. He tells her that if only he had had children and grandchildren he would have learned so much. 

Wolf-Man's Painting

Whenever I get to this point in his story I see how much he and all of us missed by being deprived of his art while he was alive. This one is now in a museum. 

Too little too late FUCKERS and I mean the primary disciples of Freud who hid him. 

Couldn't resist that. Freud seems to take the blame for so much that it is a pleasure that Lacan has come to rescue him. to place treatment on "the word" on language, on the unconscious and bypassing the cultural, the environment, the psychological development, the mechanistic technological thinking, jumping right into Joyce, Finnegan's Wake and the future before us, with electric technological thinking. 

Let's see, why did I feel I had to write this in the first place? Now I remember I wanted to bring in the Schachter-Singer Theory of double emotions. Anxiety and Excitement elicit the identical EEG physiological measurements. So whether you feel anxiety or excitement depends on your LABELING of your feelings as anxiety or as excitement. You feel excitement going to an outing where you will meet your new boyfriend and you are so excited. Whereas the same woman going to an outing fearing she will not know anyone and not be dressed appropriately feels anxiety. The same EEG though for your feelings. Reporting the anxiety to the doctor may result in a prescription for Valium or worse. For excitement you wont ask or even go to the doctor. So much for our modern, so very technological treatment options in our time of marvelous sophisticated treatments  IMO.

JOUISSANCE !!! LACAN'S UNDEFINABLE CONCEPT

!!!!JOUISSANCE!!!

LINK above for Video

JOUISSANCE is not very nice. Your mother should have warned you about it.

Diane Rubenstein

In the intro of this book Rubenstein gives us an readable and understandable reading of Lacan, Baudrillard, some Foucault whom she doesn't seem to like as much as the first two. She studied with all of them in Paris so she is the one I go to since I read this. This book is Continental Philosophy read through American presidents and Jackie and Hillary. She first taught at Yale where students there were prepared for philosophy, then at the University of Madison where they were not, so that was when she began teaching it through American presidents, a common ground for all of them. For those who keep doing a wild psychoanalysis of our leaders, here is a master psychoanalysis of the Bushies, Clinton, Reagan and Hilary thrown in before she ran for prez. After reading her on Bush I, I wondered how Bush II ever learned to speak at all. It seems Joyce's daughter did not and became an institutionalized schizophrenic. No wonder after Finnegan's Wake.

Another reading I prefer on the video of the two women and their cars is from McLuhan in his War and Peace in the Global Village.

McLuhan tells us about clothes, fashion, and clothes as weaponry. Every woman knows this is true. Then he extends his analysis to cars, their changing styles - fashions - colors, signaling class distinctions, etc but 

CARS AS EXTENDED CLOTHES, AS WEAPONRY. 

The car is an extended part of your body, and any door slammed into it or bumping yours is felt as if that other car bumped you yourself and penetrated your armor with its armor. Shades of knights in shining armor folks. 

Not to mention the violent eroticism of two women going at it with each other with murderous intentions.

So  when you watch this video of 

!JOUISSANCE!  -- LINK HERE TOO!

Remember I said all this. It is very funny!

Thoughts on Slavoj Zizek and Jordan Peterson Debate

Zizek and Peterson Debate

Much can be said and unsaid about this debate. The tickets were expensive and scalped even higher, showing the Brandens were ultimately right and Ayn Rand not. People will pay for philosophy lectures.

The Intro listed the academic credentials beginning with Z who was immediately disgusted. The ritual of the accounting and awards of the institutions of the repressive states that have granted their seals of approval - read BRANDS - for the presence of Z and Peterson on this stage, before this audience, presented for the cameras and manufactured for the prestige and brownie points - gold stars? - that will be received by the producers. Slavoj Zizek of course is being pimped for Peterson, his western supporters and their institutions.

Peterson presents a formidable and fashionable image, carefully trimmed beard, hair, and I bet finger and toenails. A Simulacrum of the early T.S. Eliot Virginia Woolf describes in her diary.

I invited X - sorry forget? - for lunch. Do come. Eliot will be here in his four piece suit. 

And this is how Wyndham Lewis has painted his portrait as a young man in Ezra Pound's salon.

T.S.Eliot Portrait by Windham Lewis

The simulacrum also smacks of the great, brilliant and unwavering man of integrity, charm and charisma, the older Leo Steinberg, who said, "Psychoanalysis saved my life." Those of us who have experienced analysis - experienced is the only valid familiarity that really counts when one is talking, writing, thinking about analysis - have all been saved by it, by Freud, and all those already saved, in order to suffer ordinary normal unhappiness rather than neurotic misery.

The other statement among many Steinberg tossed off was that in art school he graduated with first prizes in all his exhibited senior work. "And I knew then that I would never be great." So he stopped, because anyone who has personally experienced the presence of Steinberg, knew that he wanted to be great. He was superb in seeing what he called the watershed moment - 

The Foucaldian CUT

 -  in a painter's life or in painting in particular. That moment when Jasper Johns first exhibited, Steinberg was disturbed. He didn't like the work but it disturbed him so he went back and he made the Foucauldian CUT that ended Abstract Expressionism with John's breakout work. He tells of this in his book Other Criteria. 

Anyway Peterson mimics the image of those two men: urbane,cultured, educated, an extremely attractive and articulate man of his time. Z is Z, rumpled T-Shirt, roughly groomed and shaved, and wildly gesturing. A man utterly himself, warts and all, who exhibits a mass and mess of thinking that defies all linearity, continuity, persuasive progressions, categorizations and lists. 

Ah those fascist ever present lists that delineate all knowledge for us.

Two Choruses from The Rock-Eliot

The endless cycle of idea and action,

Endless invention, endless experiment,

Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;

Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;

Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word. p. 81

All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,

All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,

But nearness to death no nearer to GOD,

Where is the Life we have lost in living?

Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?

Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

And Foucault:

Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not knowing. Knowledge is made for CUTTING

Peterson is a clinical psychologist by training and he sees - saw? - patients. In the part of the debate about ethics and morality he uses the example of the patient that cannot stop wrong actions, but who has also formulated a goal for therapy. To reach his goal in therapy these obstructions to getting to the goal must be confronted. Peterson employs stopping the action of wrongness in one of small seemingly unimportant instances as a point of a beginning, an initial starting place.

A series of wrong actions? A repetition of wrong actions? And Peterson is using Wolpe and Goldstein's Behavior Therapy method of "thought stopping" turned into "action stopping" while Z has quoted Hegel, "To act is always to err," which Peterson seizes on.

The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.- Hegel

Here is where I might have intervened with, "If your patient repeatedly performs the 'wrong' action," reading through Simone Weil here, "What is the value of the opposite, the 'right action' and consider if the patient almost always knows the wrong action, then your patient almost always knows the 'right action' and avoids it. Does the patient know the right action or does your patient know the right action but does not know she knows?"

This is what would interest my knowing in just one of these exchanges lost in the morass of communication - discourse? - between Z and P.

The civilized discussion Peterson feels has taken place has occurred on the surface, yes. Because Zizek has not probed deeper to expose the contradictions, and Peterson's use of The Communist Manifesto - which was written for the workers in the factory - instead of a deep and thorough reading of Capital. The Grundrisse is not even mentioned. And Althusser's unsurpassed reading of Marx in his Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses of Reproduction.

The inadequate scholarship of Peterson, the Western debater, is visible, but only to those who have some grasp of the invisible scholarship here in this debate. The scholarship displayed by a celebrity figure the west has manufactured and produced to be pimped by the incomparable, irreplaceable, anti-xeroxible Slavoj Zizek.

The reader might also remind herself that the USSR employed many therapies, to its dissidents especially. Behavior Therapy based on Pavlov's Conditioned Response and Skinner's Operant Conditioning was especially honored. The only one that was banned, disallowed, punished was psychoanalysis.

So of course, that was the one I wanted most to experience since I was/am a negatively suggestible person. Did I write about Happiness and Capitalism here?

Auschwitz: A Heterotopia Space - A Reading Through Primo Levi

Words written in blood should not be read but learnt by heart. - Nietzsche

Auschwitz: A Heterotopia Space

A close reading of Primo Levi’s Survival In Auschwitz

Words written in blood are not to be read but learnt by heart. - Nietzsche

We are in fact convinced that no human experience is without meaning or unworthy of analysis, and that fundamental values, even if they are not positive, can be deduced from this particular world which we are describing.(p.87)

We would also like to consider that the Lager was pre-eminently a gigantic biological and social experiment. (p.87)

Anyone who has studied and been trained in statistics and experimental design who reads this from Levi, can see he is correct. Once you see it you can’t unsee it.

In my opinion Auschwitz - the Queen of the camps -  is a brilliant design for this experiment. Thousands of individuals, differing in age, condition, origin, language, culture and customs, are enclosed within barbed wire: there they live a regular, controlled life which is identical for all and inadequate to all needs, and which is more rigorous than any experimenter could have set up to establish what is essential and what adventitious to the conduct of the human animal in the struggle for life. (p.87)

Levi interprets: We believe, rather, that the only conclusion to be drawn is that in the face of driving necessity and physical disabilities many social habits and instincts are reduced to silence. (p.87) Levi goes on to speak of the Saved and the Drowned. Within the social these extremes are curtailed. Not excessive strength nor excessive weakness but in the Lager there are no curbs at all. There is no morality there, no good and no evil because there is no law in the Lager.

But in the Lager things are different: here the struggle to survive is without respite, because everyone is desperately and ferociously alone. If some Null Achtzehn vacillates, he will find no one to extend a helping hand; on the contrary, someone will knock him aside, because it is in no one’s interest that there will be one more musselman* dragging himself to work every day;

*This word Musselmann, I do not know why, was used by the old ones of the camp to describe the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection.(p.88) Viktor Frankl uses it in his Man’s Search For Meaning about his time in the Lager. Frankl was an existentialist psychiatrist, whose reading of the camps is existential. Levi’s reading is scientific and is more distant; he is also an observer as well as a slave.My reading of this word from Frankl first was its resonance with moslem and muslim..So I am reading it through Lacan and Francoise Dolto’s clinical work in Dominique as an unconscious hatred of the Other surfacing in this nickname. And Levi associates to the Other:

In the recipe book #SplendidSoups I found where mussemann (musselman) came from! It is a curry that is MUSLIM! A muslim curry! So calling the walking dead musselmann because he looked yellow and because of the prejudice of the Jews against Muslims was an intuitive association of mine and a correct one.

Many people - many nations - can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason. But when this does come about, when the unspoken dogma becomes the major premise in a syllogism, then, at the end of the chain, there is the Lager. Here is the product of a conception of the world carried rigorously to its logical conclusion; so long as the conception subsists, the conclusion remains to threaten us.

The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal. (p.9)

...and if someone, by a miracle of savage patience and cunning, finds a new method of avoiding the hardest work, a new art which yields him an ounce of bread, he will try to keep his method secret, and he will be esteemed and respected for this, and will derive from it an exclusive , personal benefit; he will become stronger and so will be feared, and who is feared is, ipso facto, a candidate for survival. (p.88)

Reading this last sentence through Foucault and his method of genealogy we see the bare beginnings of capitalism beginning in barter. Or with these Jewish slaves, is it a condition of the capitalistic social and economic culture they arrived from in all parts of Europe? Would indigenous people unexposed to capitalism but only to barter have behaved the same? Did the women behave this way in their confinement? At any rate the male Jews that survived, survived in a number of ways not different - except in extremes - from ordinary capitalist behavior. Only far more vicious and evil. To steal a bowl from a slave meant that he could get no soup until he got another. The only way for him to get another was to trade his bread ration for the bowl. He is starving, and this is his only choice. No one will lend him theirs even after finishing. And the slave must carry all his puny belongings with him wherever he goes or they will be stolen by another slave. This loss of one bowl of soup can easily result in a pound of flesh lost, which could lead to death.

Lacan says that with God present everything is permitted. With no God nothing is permitted. In the arbitrary environment of the Lager which prohibits all from any spontaneous, natural personal gesture. Only what is ordered is to be said, gestured, or done. An example:

Driven by thirst, I eyed a fine icicle outside the window, within hand’s reach, I opened the window and broke off the icicle but at once a large, heavy guard prowling outside brutally snatched it away from me. Warum? I asked him in my poor German. Hier ist kein warum (there is no why here), he replied, pushing me inside with a shove. (p.29)

The explanation is repugnant but simple: in this place everything is forbidden, not for hidden reasons, but because the camp has been created for that purpose. (p.29) And this is filling the definition of a Heterotopic Space as Foucault has conceptualized it.

This is also what Lacan means by The Big Other.

Levi rarely if at all uses the word inmate - he will in referring to the seriously ill at the end - for the Jews in the camps. Instead he always refers to them and himself as slaves. He is the only one I’ve read in this literature of the Holocaust who is that linguistically careful. Did translators not want to use slave/Jew together? The English translations use inmate. Quite a difference in meaning and resonance.

This is a controlled experiment composed of huge numbers of subjects. His title is Survival In Auschwitz. What does it take to survive the ultimate in human degradation on the road to death? It is micro fascism as Foucault has taught us to see. The minute everyday crushing of human response in every movement, gesture, word. The destruction of all rituals of social and civilized life, when everything is forbidden. So what is left? Homo Sacer - Bare Man - survival without living. Hobbes: Life was short and brutal.

What is it about the musselmen who are the walking dead? Frankl will say that at some point the man decided he no longer wanted to live and in a few days it became obvious. Shortly afterwards he was selected.

There is a memory I have from my reading and my impression is that it came from the book, This Way For The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Borowski describes a transport that has just come in. As it unloads its human cargo he sees a beautiful young woman who stands in the doorway the moment before she will step down to the platform where the selections are being made. She tucks in her blouse and he notes that she is not disheveled, her hair appears combed, her clothes neat. She stops, looks and sees the slaves who are gathering the suitcases and immediately understands what awaits her, what her future will be. She goes right away to the line of the old, the sick, the mothers, the children and joins them. An instant knowing and refusal to participate in surviving like that. Of becoming that. The walking dead.

How varied their reasons for wanting to die? Knowing that to survive they must join in being thieves, preying on the new ones before they can size the situation up, becoming what one must become to survive. Maybe they just said no, no more of this. They were the huge majority in the camps, doomed to die or choosing to die. The first ones arriving in the camps did not experience the walking dead until they became them. They will notice them turning yellow in their faces and comment on them. The later arrivals see them on arrival and see their future. This is planned of course, the first scene of terror awaiting the new arrivals.

This is invisible violence. They are also a sign which can be read in a number of ways by the new ones. They have information that the originals did not have. A choice lays before them. They may shudder and then attempt to not let it happen to them or to give up immediately. To resist they will have to be willing to take on behaviors that will help them survive, but only if they are lucky and determined.

Levi describes the three types of survival methods. I will only consider the Jews here:

     

1. The most traveled road , … is the Prominenz - Prominent. The Kapos, cooks, et al. The Jewish prominents form a sad and notable human phenomenon. In them converge present, past and atavistic sufferings, and the tradition of hostility towards the stranger makes of them monsters of asociality and insensitivity. (p.91) This man will displace and scapegoat on all those under him. If he doesn’t then they will appoint someone who will.

We are aware that this is very distant from the picture that is usually given of the oppressed who unite, if not in resistance, at least in suffering. We do not deny that this may be possible when oppression does not pass a certain limit, or perhaps when the oppressor, through inexperience or magnanimity, tolerates or favours it. . But we state that in our days, in all countries in which a foreign people have set foot as invaders, an analogous position of rivalry and hatred among the subjected has been brought about; and this, like many other human characteristics, could be experienced in the Lager in the light of particularly cruel evidence. (p.91)

2. ...there is a vast category of prisoners, not initially favored by fate, who fight merely with their own strength to survive. One has to fight against the current; to battle every day and every hour against exhaustion, hunger, cold, and the resulting inertia; to resist enemies and have no pity for rivals; to sharpen one’s wits, build up one’s patience, strengthen one’s will power. Or else, to throttle all dignity and kill all conscience, to climb down into the arena as a beast against other beasts, to let oneself be guided by those unsuspected subterranean forces which sustain families and individuals in cruel times. (p.92)
3. Elias the dwarf is in the third category. He is stronger, resourceful, sly,  and he thrives. Because he is insane. He is the most adaptable, the human type most suited  to this way of living. On the outside he will be confined to the fringes...in a prison or lunatic asylum. But here in the Lager there are no criminals or madmen; no criminals because there is no moral law to contravene, no madmen because we are wholly devoid of free will, as our every action is, in time and place, the only conceivable one.  ...Elias, as far as we could judge from outside, and as far as the phrase can have  meaning was probably a happy person. For those who have no sound inner resources, for those who do not know how to draw from their own consciences sufficient force to cling to life, the only road to salvation leads to Elias:  to insanity and to deceitful bestiality. All the other roads are dead ends. (p.98)

Levi will go on to tell us of Henri, who on the other hand, is eminently civilized and sane, and possesses a complete and organic theory on the ways to survive in Lager. He is  only twenty-two, he is extremely intelligent, speaks French, German, English and Russian,  has an excellent scientific and classical culture. According to Henri’s theory, there are three methods open to man to escape extermination which still allow him to retain the name of man: organization, pity and theft. He himself practices all three. (p.98)

The Soviet Union and Israel refused to publish his writings on Auschwitz. Israel received masses of survivors. People who had done what they did to survive. There is no way to unknow what you did and did to others to get any slight advantage that would enable you to survive. These people composed a huge demographic in Israel, their rage and guilt was fed to their children and grandchildren. Evil trickles down unto the seventh generation. God is conservative in this estimate. The Palestinians are enduring this displacement today, this Identification with the Aggressor. In Israel there were so very many. Those who entered the diaspora were absorbed and without political power to do the same.

Tadeusz Borowski. This Way For the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Francoise Dolto. Dominique: Analysis of an Adolescent

Viktor Frankl. Man’s Search for Meaning

Michel Foucault. The Order of Things

Jacques Lacan. Ecrits.

Primo Levi. Survival In Auschwitz

Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra

DIANE BURKO: THE PAINTER OF HER GENERATION

SLIDE SHOW

POLITICS OF SNOW

What determines an artist who makes works of art revered through the ages of time?

Success in their own time? 

One landmark is a CUT in Art History such as Picasso made more than once. Is it this? 

Leonardo took on great themes of mythology, of portrait painting, of landscape.

Michangelo's great theme was Christianity in the Sistine Chapel.

IMO the great theme now is the DEATH of Planet Earth as we know it, this hospitable place for our species and all those contemporaneous with us that took hundreds of millions of years to prepare.

What other artist has spent her life detailing this catastrophe we have made?

And why has she not been recognized as such? A prophet in her own country aphorism?

Well she has been traveling, teaching drawing/painting for 30 years, raising a family and working non stop in her studio, not schmoozing and PR ing with the rich and famous. Not a lifestyle to attract big time buyers around the world.

I first met Diane Burko quietly in the cafeteria at the University of Pennsylvania. I was doing research in psychology on Piaget's Conservation Concepts and she was beginning her MFA in preparation for teaching. There was nothing about her to suggest she had visions of greatness in her field. She was getting her credentials for teaching. And that's all I remember of her.

I would come across her work hanging in homes (John McCoubrey for one) and these early paintings were birds's eye views of landscapes. A green country farm, Philadelphia from the sky or up high somewhere. The kind of thing you see on google these days of places you know.

I would hear about her but never in terms of her being the next great thing. Her early large paintings of glaciers were elegant, austere, untouchable,  indifferent to us, our eyes looking at these objects. The brush strokes did not play erotically on the canvas, did not convey sensuousness. These fierce bitterly cold and indifferent glaciers were monstrously indifferent as Herzog would say, and Burko responded in kind. Her brushstrokes followed Nietsche's advice "Be more so than the subject, be WORSE!"

Then in the early 1990's Burko would get a grant to live and paint in Monet's Giverny. Here she painted the same scenes Monet painted and her brush was inspired by his, her strokes flowed and dripped and she became a different painter.  It was then I came to know her better through a mutual friend. And then I left Philadelphia. 

When I thought of her I began to think of her as a witness of Climate Change in the world. All her paintings became paintings of a lost world to me in my mind. Her life's work a chronicle of grief which she seemed not to acknowledge in any of her interviews online or in person. 

An example of Lacan and Zizek comes to mind for her. The unknown knowns that rule our lives, our destinies. I can think of nothing else that explains all the years she did this, flying in helicopters, airplanes, touring all these inaccessible unloving places. 

By 2006 the awareness of Climate Change, then labeled Global Warming, went more mainstream. Burko's paintings were then sought out to promote what scientists had been saying in their dry obtuse way with numbers and graphs. The paintings were irresistible for making their point and Burko responded with her great generosity of spirit. 

She no longer has to take her own photos because science has recorded these changes for her in their scientific photos. Places that she visited with exhilaration and desire, camera in hand, leaning out the opened door of a plane to get the shot she wanted, were now available to her as change by change took place. As Baudrillard would say what was conceived in the Symbolic Order as passion, living, sacred, death, love, seduction, challenge was entering the Order of Production. Science, measurement, survival, fascination, control began to take over and Burko began to paint the changes in those places of long ago that would never be the same again.

Here is where we get into the CUT in art history, the age old problem of representation. 

The more recent paintings of the glaciers, the mountains of ice encrusted snow over stone have melted, so what are we seeing. We are seeing representations of NOW? No longer the same as THEN. 

Burko has expressed her early abstract leanings as opposed to the landscape by jumping out of the dichotomy, the binary box art history had long confined them in, and soaring up high to Heaven, taking the object with a God's Eye perspective. Philip Guston also merged the figure/abstract concept he had struggled with. Art is eliminating contradictions, ideology, false dichotomies.

Now we can see a figure as abstract. We can google the Earth and its lands, sea, and air which now appear as abstract paintings. The artists gave us these images first in some way knowing what to reveal to us.

Where is the original? Is it the glacier now? Or is the one now the simulacrum. Maybe the simulacrum is the one Burko photographed and painted years and years ago? Is the original one 100 years ago? 1000000 ago? It is impossible to know. 

Each one in time is a simulacrum.

There cannot be anything to be called representational for it will become different in time. There will never be an original, only copies of copies.

The illusion of an original is an illusion.

There is no such thing.It has just been made up.Time will change anything

but maybe so slow you cannot notice.

Am I the same as the young woman who met Burko in 1966? Am I the simulacrum now? Or was I the simulacrum then?

I have no identity.Only multiple selves.

There is no linear time. No beginning. No end.

I am always someone different. I just change too slowly for myself to notice.

Now the glacier has changed in my lifetime so I can see the changes.

Glaciers used to change slowly so in one life their changes were not seen.

Now they change faster and faster so we can see. 
Will they speed up like a movie?

Now Burko photographs and paints volcanoes. The melting molten rivers of fire run down and around the volcano, twisting and flowing, burning all in its path then turning to hard, charcoal stony rock petrified lava gone cold. Stopped.

And here is the resonance with Houellebecq's Lanzarote.

Lanzarote - tourist attraction now

Once a cheap tourist destination until Houellebecq made it famous, these islands had endured volcanic explosions for over 100 years. The EFFECT on the people is detailed by Houellebecq in the Afterward of the novel. They are cautious, unfriendly, suspicious people.

So Burko has just destroyed representational art.

That is a fact. Did she intend to do it?
She has said her GOD'S EYE perspective on landscape is so she can keep abstraction.

Why do just idiots review her work, ask her stupid questions?

Does Burko cry at night for these lost glaciers and icy mountains?

I do. I cry at night. Someone ask her in an interview.

Does she love them? Petit still loved the World Trade Center Towers he walked across.

Gordon Levitt as Philippe Petit

The glaciers, mountains and the World Trade Center Towers
are Strange Attractors

These buildings are seductive.  And seduction is coupled with challenge. Always. Just like mountains, like Everest. They are objects beckoning the subject. They were Strange Attractors from Baudrillardian theory. Just as particles in a particle accelerator with opposite charges seek each other, play with each other, and when they collide....pouf!

These objects, these Strange Attractors, have been luring and seducing Burko all her life. They have wanted her to know, to speak for their voicelessness.

There is no original. Both are simulacra

LINK for multi images of Burko

Reviews - I include them so you can see that they can't see.
http://www.locksgallery.com/attachment/en/558176bf278e1af86c88ecaf/Press/55c106334bd750a949d05ac8

  http://www.locksgallery.com/attachment/en/558176bf278e1af86c88ecaf/Press/55c108444bd7507e4ad05ac8

http://www.locksgallery.com/attachment/en/558176bf278e1af86c88ecaf/Press/55c0ebbd4ad7508c19c6b548