The Ecocritical Gaze-Object: The Smell of Absent Roses and the Reimagined Floral Vase

Metavase (ceramic) 2026. Picture: J Scott

-Johannes Scott, August 2026.

Since antiquity and until the 17th century, the pre‑Cartesian model of aesthetic representation remained largely unchanged. After the Renaissance, however, two major reconfigurations in perception produced a new model of scientific knowledge that transformed not only the representation of the object but also the position of its observing subject. First, the Enlightenment displaced the Aristotelian metaphysics of the Middle Ages, replacing the divinely saturated, intimate object of Scholastic thought with an external object measurable through the Cartesian ideal of coherent, unified human reason. A period of forlorn resistance followed in the 19th century, as traditional mastery gave way to new epistemic uncertainties. Then, after Freud’s discovery of the unconscious in 1900, Saussure’s structural linguistics in 1916, Lacan’s psychoanalytic synthesis in the mid‑20th century, and its anglophone reception in the 1990s, the 20th century produced an entirely new perception of the object and its subject. The magnitude of the object in Western thought became fully visible only in the 21st century through the theoretical instruments of poststructuralism and curatorial reception, enabling a contemporary reimagining of the aesthetic object.

Freud’s discovery of the unconscious decisively ruptured the nostalgic stage of 19th‑century aesthetics by dismantling the solipsistic, self‑centred subject that underpinned both Realism and its late Romantic and mystical offshoots. In Romantic introspection, natural objects such as mountains and storms stood as transparent symbolic representation of human emotion and artists such as Gauguin still assumed that inner life could be directly expressed—an unbroken passage from subjective feeling to symbolic form—while in mystical modernism figures like van Gogh and Munch treated the external object as a radiant extension of the artist’s psyche. Freud made such continuity untenable: by revealing psychic life as split, opaque, and structured by dreamwork, displacement, and repression, he showed that neither introspective expression nor mystical projection could transparently reveal the self.

This rupture opened new artistic pathways. Before the First World War, Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical cityscapes already staged estrangement and latent meaning rather than subjective expression, anticipating Freud’s model of symbolic opacity. During the war, André Breton applied Freudian psychoanalytic techniques to shell-shocked patients in a neurological hospital; after the armistice, he authored the Surrealist Manifesto, grounding Surrealism in Freudian theory. Surrealist artist Salvador Dalí visualized unconscious temporality and desire in works such as The Persistence of Memory (1931). Across these developments, artworks such as Attempting the Impossible (1928) and Magritte’s The Human Condition (1933) ceased to mirror a unified subject or a transparent object; instead, they became sites where the unconscious—its distortions, desires, and fractures—reconfigured representation itself, decisively de‑centring the 19th‑century self and its stable world.

Freud’s psychoanalytic clinic in 1920s Vienna stood at the centre of avant‑garde culture, where free association and dream analysis offered Surrealist artists direct methods for reimagining the aesthetic object. The publication of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics (1916) had already proposed a structural linguistic model of meaning, but its impact remained limited until the 1930s, when the Vienna Circle issued a categorical rejection of Freud, dismissing psychoanalysis as speculative and unscientific. In its place they advanced a rationalist program that reconceived the literary aesthetic object as a semiotic sign—arbitrary signifier, conceptual signified, and meaning produced through differential relations. This structuralist redefinition remained confined to philosophy and literary theory until mid‑century mediation by Jakobson, Lévi‑Strauss, and Barthes. Only after WWII, and especially in the late 1960s, did structuralism enter visual art under the name conceptual art, where meaning was treated as a system of relations, codes, and linguistic structures. Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs (1965) marks the decisive turn, operationalising Saussure’s signifier/signified distinction through object, image, and definition. Later feminist work such as Martha Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen (1975) extends this structuralist logic, parodying domestic sign systems through performative linguistic critique.

Across these conceptual artworks, structuralism manifests not as style but as epistemic shift: meaning is produced through relations, codes, and metalanguages rather than through expression, symbol, or unconscious content. The result is a distinct artistic formation whose logic remained incompatible with the Freudian avant‑garde until Lacan’s linguistic rereading of Freud, formulated in his Parisian seminars between 1953 and 1964. This synthesis remained institutionally inaccessible to Anglophone artists until the late 1980s–1990s, when his major works such as Écrits were translated and his central concept—“The unconscious is structured like language”—received broad dissemination in English. Once consolidated with feminist theory, cultural studies, and film theory, artists such as Mary Kelly, Victor Burgin, Barbara Kruger, Isaac Julien, Sophie Calle, and Christian Boltanski began to engage an explicitly Lacanian poststructuralism. Thus, Lacan’s linguistified Freud becomes an artistic and curatorial resource long after earlier Saussurean conceptualism, producing a 21st‑century global psycho‑linguistic perception of the aesthetic object.

For the curation of contemporary art museums and international events, Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory offers viewers a way to see art not as personal expression but as a signifying structure that positions the spectator within a collective symbolic fantasy. In a Kiefer installation, the monumental archive becomes a symbolic order that situates the viewer within histories they did not choose; in Koons, the glossy surface operates as an Imaginary lure, staging the subject’s relation to commodity desire; in Sophie Calle or Christian Boltanski, the absent figure becomes an objet a, a gap around which narrative and longing circulate; in Isaac Julien’s films, the camera organizes the gaze as a cultural structure rather than a personal viewpoint. Thus, Lacan’s curatorial object provides a guide for audiences to read artworks as structures of desire, signification, and representation that produce reception, making the encounter with art less a matter of decoding symbols and more an experience of recognizing how one’s own subjectivity is shaped by the visual and linguistic systems the artwork stages.

As this psycho‑linguistic mode of reception becomes globally consolidated, the broader cultural horizon in which these artworks are encountered is often labelled postmodernism—a term frequently reduced to late‑20th‑century American pastiche, comic‑book irony, or a stylistic period that simply follows modernism. Yet postmodernism is better understood as a critical orientation that questions the authority of any single worldview, recognising only the universal structure—or real—of language, that stubborn point where meaning slips and the signifier exposes its constitutive lack. From this vantage, cultural objects are read exegetically as discursive formations rather than as stable ideological or historical expressions. All texts—ancient myths, classical philosophy, modernist works, and contemporary media—enter a single synchronic field where temporal hierarchies dissolve and the entire cultural archive becomes available for reappropriation, a cornucopia of delights ready to be re‑read, re‑staged, and re‑desired. Within this horizon, reality is modelled only through discourse, through the symbolic order that leaves its trace as absence or difference. Consequently, postmodern representation operates through seduction: it lures the viewer toward the gaze‑object, producing the subject through desire and drawing them into the shimmering play of signifiers where meaning entices, withdraws, and continually remakes itself.

A clear example of this postmodernist reappropriation—where a cultural object is drawn into a synchronic field and reread through the discursive logic of desire and the gaze—appears in Michel Foucault’s celebrated analysis of Velázquez’s Las Meninas in The Order of Things (1966). Rather than approaching the painting through art‑historical method, Foucault treats it as a conceptual artifice that reveals a profound shift in the structure of representation at the midpoint between the Classical and Modern object. His reading shows how the painting anticipates the very logic of the gaze that Lacan would later formalize: Velázquez paints himself painting, yet his look is directed outward—toward the viewer, toward the king, toward the Other—while the royal couple appears only as a reflected trace in a distant mirror. In this configuration, the viewer is displaced from the position of sovereign observer and becomes the object of the painting’s look. The act of seeing is already structured by an unseen gaze that precedes and frames the viewer’s own. Foucault’s genealogical method thus reappropriates a 17th‑century artwork into a contemporary discursive horizon, revealing Las Meninas as a scene in which the gaze‑object is staged centuries before Lacan: a painting that knows it is being looked at, and shows that the viewer is already caught within its field of desire.

In this postmodern horizon, the metavase reappropriates the ancient convention of the floral vessel and rereads it as a contemporary ecocritical text. What appears at first as a familiar decorative object—a vase of cut flowers—reveals itself, under discursive scrutiny, as a gaze‑object that stages the viewer’s relation to absence rather than beauty. The cut flower seems present, concrete, sensuous, yet its presence is immediately unstable: severed from its origin, it becomes a remnant, a fragment whose gaze returns not from the viewer’s anthropocentric fantasy of nature mastered as ornament, but from elsewhere—an elsewhere closer to mausoleum than meadow. In this doubling, the flower loses its spatial immediacy to the process of signification, becoming less a living bloom than an image structured by lack, a trace of what has already been taken, stilled, and stilled again. The porcelain vase, long associated with domestic beauty, now operates as a postmodernist device that reframes the floral object as a second‑order reality, a representation of ecological absence that seduces the viewer into empathy. Its lure is not the promise of vitality but the uncanny return of a gaze that knows it has been cut, arranged, aestheticised. Thus, the metavase becomes a contemporary gaze‑object: a seductive artifice that invites the viewer to think themselves into the position of the flower, to feel the quiet, fragrant pull of what might be called the smell of absent roses—a cornucopia of delights that reveals, beneath its surface, the ethical demand of the nonhuman other.

In this way, the gaze‑object—whether in Velázquez’s court or in the quiet porcelain of the metavase—reveals that the aesthetic encounter is never simply a matter of looking at an object, but of recognizing how the object looks back, drawing the viewer into the fragile, ethical space where desire, absence, and responsibility meet.

Johannes Scott received a BA in English and Theory of Literature from UNISA in 2011, followed by postgraduate studies in Theory of Drama (2013), Narratology (2014), and Critical Theory (2015), with specialisation in Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory of aesthetics.

Sources:

Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books.

Miller, Jacques-Alain (ed). 1973. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964). New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Waugh, P. (ed). 2006. Literary Theory and Criticism, an Oxford guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press.