PING! Frances Goodman and the Resonance of Desire
- Johannes Scott
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Johannes Scott -December 2025
Collectors of Chinese porcelain have long tapped vases to hear their acoustic signature — the high-pitched ping that vibrates through the fragile ceramic shell. This sound is not mere ornament: it is the resonance of the absence around which the potter shaped the form. In Chinese aesthetics, the void is often treated as the vessel’s true content. For Lacanian psychoanalysis, the ping is a ritual encounter with the Real — the empty kernel at the heart of every symbolic form — the resist against symbolic capture. The ping is the sonic trace of this lack, a surplus effect disproportionate to its cause, shimmering and disappearing as soon as it appears.
Goodman’s exhibition PING! reactivates this ancient gesture in a contemporary register. Just as porcelain collectors listen for the void speaking back, Goodman’s ceramic emojis ping against the ideological fantasy of digital transparency. The sound of porcelain becomes a metaphor for the hollow resonance of affect in the age of Unicode: both are structured around absence, both produce surplus effects that captivate, and both reveal desire as organised not by fullness but by lack.
The curatorial statement by Dr. Roelof Petrus van Wyk, Pixel to Pot: The Material Politics of Frances Goodman’s PING!, frames the exhibition as a critique of techno ideology, which substitutes embodied relationality with digital proxies. Goodman’s ceramic vase becomes a performative gesture of dissent against the fantasy that emojis provide transparent emotional communication and authentic self-expression — the injunction that if we simply select the right emoji, the other will finally understand us. In reality, the endless proliferation of emojis functions as the bureaucratisation of affect: a seductive system that promises nuance while in fact standardising emotional life and eroding decorum.
Goodman’s intertextual reworking of emojis resembles quilting in the Lacanian sense: she stitches fragments of a pre-existing symbolic order into a new configuration, reopening the space of desire for the Real that the digital system forecloses.
To understand Goodman’s symbolic defiance, we must consider the universality of Emojipedia within the Unicode Standard — a master code of affect that governs our digital exchanges. Lacan reminds us that social reality itself is structured by language, by the symbolic order that positions us within its web. This order is not fixed but endlessly sliding: free floating signifiers drift metonymically until they are momentarily arrested by a master signifier. It is this quilting point — the moment when the master signifier halts the drift of the floating signifier — that produces the illusion of meaning.
In digital communication, an emoji (floating signifier) may slip into the vacant slot of a master signifier such as the ideological fantasy of emotional self-expression. The chain pauses, and the user experiences a fleeting sense of signification, as if the right emoji could finally bridge the gap of understanding. Yet the subject — reader or writer — is not the sovereign who commands this process. The subject is its effect: the position that emerges when the master signifier quilts the floating signifier, when sliding is momentarily stopped.
Goodman’s sculptures intervene precisely here. She takes the same free-floating signifiers but relocates them into a different symbolic frame, where a new master signifier — the ideological fantasy of aesthetic reception — arrests their movement. In this gesture, the Unicode Standard is exchanged for the aesthetic code of gallery convention. Meaning shifts: what once promised digital transparency now becomes artifice, parody, surface play. The subject of reception is repositioned, not as the signified, but as the effect of this re-quilting — caught in the gap between signifiers and confronted with the surplus enjoyment that sustains desire.
To aesthetically appreciate Goodman’s defiance, we return to Lacan’s counsel: the meaning of a sign emerges only within the symbolic system that frames it. Goodman’s clay emoji is not simply pottery but an anamorphic object exhibited under the title PING! — inscribed within the curatorial code of consequential aesthetics. In this displacement, the Unicode emoji dies as a functional sign and returns as a parodic artifice, a “fake emoji” staging its own theatricality. No longer promising transparent communication, it frames fantasy — the minimal circumscription of the empty place of desire.
Goodman’s vase does not invite unveiling for true meaning; it insists on surface play, demanding to be orbited at a respectful distance. In this orbit, the viewer encounters not the emoji’s supposed authenticity but its hollow core, the void around which the artwork is structured. It is precisely this void — sustained by the aesthetic frame — that allows contemplation to linger, desire to circulate, and symbolic completion to remain tantalisingly out of reach. The ping of porcelain thus returns as the ping of affect, resounding in Goodman’s art as the trace of lack that sustains desire. (The exhibition is on view at SMAC Gallery Cape Town until 9 January 2026)
Johannes Scott received the BA degree in English and Theory of Literature at UNISA in 2011; postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), Critical Theory (2015); with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics
Sources:
Miller, J.-A. (Ed.). The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. W.W. Norton, 1998.
Žižek, S. The Plague of Fantasies. Verso, 2008. (First published 1997)
Žižek, S. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 2008. (First published 1989)
