JOHANNES SCOTT​

This essay traces a genealogy of the gaze object from Freud and structuralism through Lacan and postmodernism to articulate a contemporary ecocritical aesthetics. Through Foucault’s reading of Las Meninas, it shows how desire and absence reorganize the viewer’s position within a discursive field. The metavase—cut flowers arranged in a vase—reimagines an ancient convention as an ethical gaze object, returning a nonhuman gaze of ecological absence that invites empathy and respo

This poetics of the real examines KALLA as an aesthetic relic whose cut, naming, and extimate allure expose the structural void that animates desire. Through Lacanian topology, the artwork functions as objet petit a, drawing the viewer into an orbit of fascination, trauma, and self division.

It is precisely in this orbiting gaze—neither too close to pierce the illusion nor too distant to disengage—that the aesthetic object as objet a reclaims the philosophical terrain of the sublime. Lacan’s theory of sublimation does not merely elevate the lost object; it stages a drama of desire at a safe remove, where the viewer is invited to admire without consummation. This “Goldilocks distance,” calibrated by fantasy and sustained by symbolic elevation, echoes the classical

It is not a container but a frame for absence, a poetic ruin of wholeness. The montage itself threatens to unravel, disintegrating into charcoal smears and a trash of pulp—back to the graphite rubble from which the animation emerged.

This Frankensteinian act—simulating life in a dead bloom—epitomizes our obsession with beautiful deception.

Modern art theory is shaped by a constellation of concepts that unsettle perception, reframe familiarity, and interrogate the conditions of meaning. Among these, the uncanny occupies a pivotal place—bridging psychoanalytic insight, linguistic mediation, and aesthetic estrangement.

Walter Ford probes the gaze of the symbolic lion, burdened by the weight of cultural signs stacked on its back since antiquity.

The popular use of the potter’s vase to display a bunch of cut flowers in water was first recorded in ancient Egyptian culture. The purpose of this enduring custom is not need, instead, its significance has always been symbolic pleasure.

When we cut flowers from nature, some primal Thing is lost. The absence of the Thing – the lack – is present within the flower vase convention. It is present as vacant place – a placeholder for the Thing that is void. This is the designated place for the uncanny object: objet a.

The series of porcelain sculptures appropriates the conventional ceramic form of 18th century rococo figurines.